Because life is neither all one thing or another, Dan and I did have a strange encounter with a couple we were trying to befriend a few days ago. I had to chalk this up to this old adage, “No good deed goes unpunished.”
After working with half of the couple to throw her a birthday party the likes of which she had never experienced before, she somehow decided that I had hired her to make the cake for the cookout birthday party we are throwing next weekend. Even though that next happened. When I told her I had already asked another friend to make the cake, which had always been the plan from the beginning, she quickly came undone and stopped talking to me.
About two weeks later, her boyfriend is telling my husband that they can’t be friends with us since I hadn’t apologized for her misunderstanding and we need to reflect on our actions in this situation so we can learn and grow from it. All I could think of was how the boyfriend had previously told me that she didn’t really have any friends and how I originally took it as bad luck or circumstance. When in actuality, it was behavior like this.
Of course, this was the same person who almost canceled her birthday party because she expected all of her friends to message her on her birth date with happy birthday messages without any prompts or reminders like it was some kind of friend test she was waiting for everyone to fail.
And yes, most of the failed. Including me.
Even though I had only known her for two months and she had literally told her birth date once in conversation and that was literally it. I had to offer a groveling apology to her along with fact that my bipolar diagnosis has a major impact on my memory. She didn’t care about how mental illness has robbed me of being able to do anything other than write things down. But she graciously let this mishap slide because I hadn’t known her that long.
When it came down to it, I was not at all surprised when my husband told me the boyfriend had told him they couldn’t be friends. I was a little surprised when she felt the need to text my husband to no longer contact her or her boyfriend after my husband had already blocked him, but what can you do?
A few days ago I got on TikTok for the first time in weeks and saw I had messages from an account I didn’t recognize. I scrolled through their profile to try to figure out who they were and realized it was none other than the birthday girl herself.
I recognized a background in a thumbnail and watched the video, realizing that during the birthday party I had planned, paid for, organized, and setup, she had disappeared with her boyfriend and the two friends she had invited to post TikToks. Dan, myself, and another adult were still in the living room chatting and hanging out. The caption praised her real friends for attending her party. Other videos featured photos shot by the photographer I hired to capture the event over royalty free music. Of course, only the birthday girl and her friends were in the featured photos.
I messaged my bestie about this latest bizarre development and she said something that put it all into perspective: Good thing that trash took itself out.