The only dream I remember having last night was one where this homeless woman approached me trying to tell me God just loved the hell outa her even though she’d had all kinds of hardships. Then she tried to tell me God’s blessed me with my language abilities and hogwash like that.

I said, “Lady, if God loved you that much you wouldn’t be in one mess after another, and God didn’t bless me with my language abilities either. I learned what I learned through years of hard work and study. Give credit where credit is due and quit kidding yourself about God and considering your enemies to be your friends. After all, you wouldn’t consider a person a friend who let bad things happen to you, would you?”

When I woke up I realized that part of the reason why I could never forgive God isn’t just the magnitude and the number of hardships and curses He’s tossed my way, but because forgiving Him would be too much like a woman forgiving an abusive man. It’s just all wrong to me. Simply backward. But the one thing I can do is appreciate the good times. Things are wonderful now. All we need is a decent place of our own, then they couldn’t get much better than that so long as there were no unexpected problems there that we couldn’t anticipate beforehand.

Other than life’s usual annoyances that everyone has to deal with, it’s just a waiting game from here on out. Until then I expect the upcoming change of weather to bring about more barking, bulldozing and other projects. I really hoped to be gone by now but things always take longer than you expect. Always. We’re no exception to that rule.

Today may be the last day that we’ll be in the 70s this year. Tomorrow will be cloudy and 60s, then 50s and rainy.

I was disappointed but not surprised to wake up and find I’d gone up a pound. This is right around the time (a week) when my body weight tries to reset itself and fights to hang onto the extra weight. Plus, as I shift onto nights I don’t lose as much weight in my sleep. I’ll stick to the diet another week but if I either gain back what I’ve lost or don’t lose anymore then I’ll have to go to a doctor one of these days and see if I can find out why they only work for a week for me. I think I can lose a little more, though. At least I hope I can. If not, then I would think something must be wrong somewhere.

Later…

Tom’s got jury duty on Monday, but he’ll be paid for his time, so that’s cool. Instead of bustling about a sweaty warehouse he can just kick back in our tiny town’s no doubt corrupt little courthouse.

I was just sitting here thinking of Kim and reflecting back on our “friendship.” Why didn’t I see it? Why didn’t I see just how fucked she was till the very end of our two-year friendship? I’m usually pretty good with this sort of thing, too. I could tell right away that she was a bit slow and that she wasn’t very bright. But being flaky and sometimes annoying while writing silly, off-the-wall stories doesn’t necessarily constitute crazy. Yet it was there all along. The classic signs of MPD.

The annoyances first began with odd and excessive behavior. First it was the overtweeting back when I used to have a Twitter account. I couldn’t figure out why it had to take her 16 tweets to get a point across that could be done in 2 or 3. Yet despite being given up to 150 characters per tweet, she’d usually use just half or less of the allotted characters. But we all have our annoying quirks and so I just dealt with it, though I did complain a few times hoping she would take the hint before she deactivated that account. She followed me from her newest account, but I didn’t follow back. I didn’t want to have to scroll and scroll to get to the tweets that actually interested me.

Then came the constant, and I mean constant, a never-ending slew of self-portraits she’d take of herself and post on Facebook. They were always the same old face shots, never any body shots. She’d post them by the hundreds and I eventually kicked her stuff off my stream because, well, I just got sick of looking at her. I sometimes wondered if she did it to try to convince others – or perhaps herself – that she was attractive. Not to sound rude or mean but Kim really wasn’t anything to look at. The self-proclaimed blue-eyed blond who was clearly a gray-eyed and extremely heavy woman with muddy brown hair, had such bloated features that it was hard to tell what she really looked like. Colors were easy enough to see, but was she pretty? Was she plain? Was she ugly? Even her nose seemed enormous, and again, I don’t mean to sound cruel, harsh or judgmental. No one’s perfect, including me. But she did one time come crying to me about her weight after admitting that all she basically did was stuff herself and sit at her computer all day. Therefore, it was kind of hard to feel sorry for her. No one can change our weight but us, so if you’re going to complain, at least do something about it along the way while you’re at it. Yet day after day she would continue to complain, eat, and post her incredibly swollen face, and I still didn’t see the craziness within. I simply thought she was a bit on the weird side and simply didn’t know how to begin to help herself. She didn’t seem to have much of a support system either.

Next came the repetitiveness. She would ask me the same damn questions over and over, and her mile-long blog entries would say the same damn things again and again, just in different ways.

Then the lies began. First she wouldn’t admit that she wasn’t really reading my stories when I would ask for her opinion, even though I told her it was perfectly ok to admit it if suspense wasn’t her cup of tea and she wasn’t interested. After all, I wasn’t interested in her fantasy stories, most of which contained celebrities for most of its characters, along with a few of her former friends, myself included.

Then it was on to one contradiction after another, but again I dismissed it on pure silliness and her being an airhead. Finally, a red flag went up. The Kim who could speak six languages on Facebook could now only speak one another site. The vows to not base characters in her silly stories after Molly was quickly forgotten and the Kimantics were beginning to really add up.

Next up were all the celebrity impersonation gigs. At first she admitted they were “fan” sites, but then she became these people. Literally. It was a bit chilling to watch this middle-aged woman with no life, who never had a real job or lover, and who was still living at home, literally become these various celebrities. She morphed into these beings and spoke to the fans she fooled and deceived not like it was some big old fucking joke she was getting a kick out of but as if she were really these people. She merged right into their minds, their personalities, their likes, their careers, and their entire lives. The transition was as smooth as glass. Only she did it in a childishly silly way with tons of typos and grammatical errors that gave her away to those who knew her.

When confronted, she was quick to delete, deny and delude. No matter how obvious it was to those who knew her, she reacted as guilty as guilty gets. After being confronted, she would deactivate her accounts only to create new ones doing the same thing. And once again she’d be called out and she would delete, deny and delude. “It was really so and so that did it, not me!” she’d insist. But she was beyond a bad liar. One didn’t need to know her that well to know she was lying.

It wasn’t until someone on Ask started hitting me with all kinds of nasty “questions” that the sad reality of this person I had considered a friend, despite her imperfections, and that I thought considered me a friend as well, hit me full force. The magnitude of her insanity shone through and hit me like a semi out of control. With all the things I was learning about Kim I was beginning to suspect more and more that the insults flung at me on Ask that I had assumed were from Molly and her mother (though I’m sure some were) were really from Kim. And so I asked her a question right after I got one of the usual “I smell a loser called Lady Rainbow” questions written much in her style of writing, and sure enough, she was on at the time and answered back.

Had I known what would happen next I never would’ve confronted her. I’d have simply walked away quietly. Instead, I confronted her with, “Ok, I know it’s you, Kim. Ha Ha, very funny, but the joke’s over now, ok?”

I would have been prepared to let it go at that and move on so long as she didn’t do it again, but what she did do was react with that classic guilty reaction. Only this time she went beyond delete, deny and delude. She got nasty on me. And now I had another Molly on my tail only this one was of a worse kind because she was too crazy to even know who the hell she was. This one wasn’t just playing around. This was a sicko. A genuine loon. Molly may be crazy in her own kind of way and say some mean things at times, but she was always just Molly and she was never nearly as big of a liar either. Trying to reason with someone who had anger issues and was a little off-balance was one thing. Yes, Molly could be a pest and yes she was very stalkerish in many ways by not going away when I asked her to until she took measures to better herself and her life, but looking back on it now I can just imagine how often Kim must have been instigating Molly and harassing her just as much if not more than Molly ever harassed her. Once Kim’s true colors emerged and all this anger came out I didn’t even know was there, I know she couldn’t possibly have been totally innocent where Molly was concerned. I have no desire to ever again be friends with either one of them, but Molly had to have taken some serious harassment from Kim. No doubt about that!

I always wondered, and still do, just how much awareness Kim has. I’ve read up on MPD and she really does seem to fit the profile. They are said to lose awareness for hours at a time while other “personalities” or “alters” take over. I remember once she said something about a place where one of her alters lived and I thought she was joking, but this statement tells me she must have some awareness of her behavior, at least some of the time. They are said to do things the “host” which is basically their main self, as funny as they may sound, doesn’t remember later on. Maybe one of Kim’s alters harassed me and maybe it was the “real” Kim I confronted and she reacted with so much hate and anger and all the relentless taunts and insults because she truly believed she was innocent and that I dumped her for nothing. I don’t think so, though. I think for some reason she is just a very hateful person who hated me all along. It does take a lot of hate to do what she did, not that she still may not have MPD and not that she isn’t a very sick person.

But still, why didn’t I see it? Why didn’t I see it coming, this craziness within?