Twisted

How twisted do you think a person can be before their bones actually crumple under the weight of being THAT fucked up?

This past week, fabulously hot on the heels of my Grandpa's cancer-related death, a friend of mine told me SHE was diagnosed with cancer and was having surgery to remove a kidney, where the cancer was lurking and buying cigarettes, liquor and porn for minors. Naturally, I wished her good luck, and felt awful for her.

That was about the end of where it was clean and dry.

There's an enormous saga behind it, but the bottom line is that she told us her sister was going to email us with updates on her condition. When the sister DID, a whole bunch of stuff didn't add up...the hospital had no record of her, the sister was variously nutty and involved, nutty and uninvolved, and then, finally, completely clueless and told one of us that our friend was in fact at home with bronchitis. Whatever. We compiled an expose email of sorts and sent it out and then waited for the debris to rain down, which of course it has.

That's all beside the point, as I see it. I am trying to figure out whether anyone - especially someone who I genuinely liked and enjoyed spending time with - could actually be twisted enough to lie about having cancer. She loves attention, this I and all of her friends know, but this seems so psychotically beyond the scope of even the most dedicated attention whore that I have a hard time wrapping my brain around it. This isn't to say I'm changing my mind...all the evidence, I mean ALL the evidence, points towards her being completely full of shit. I don't regret sending the email or looking beneath the surface to find out what was going on. The hospitals we called, the ones her "sister" told us she was at and the one she later said she'd been at, had NO record of her, under THREE variants of her name she claimed she was there under. What is going ON?

I just can't come to terms with the fact that someone I know and associate with would actually do such a thing. I have long since accepted that there is a lot of evil in the world, with murders and rapes happening right now as I type this, and whole other castes of darkness below even that with drug underworlds and human trafficking and organized crime and genital mutilation and genocide...but my life HAPPENS to be occuring on the same planet as all that. In my little house in Massachusetts, I vote in US elections and have a great guy and two cute cats to come home to, and can choose freely to do as I like, unmolested by the ickier sides of other lives whose running times happen to be simultaneous to mine. To have someone even get herself into a situation where I would have to debate whether her sickness is real or not makes it seem like maybe there's a crack in my world through which all the evils of the world, great or small, could creep through, dank and sticky and unclean.

And of course it's like a chemical burn. It's eating me up.

I really do hope she proves herself innocent.