CHAPTER THIRTY

PAST

Angel, Gia and I had been living together, working together and partying together for months. Did I really think it would last? Did I really think this would have a positive outcome? I honestly don’t know, somewhere down the line, I stopped analyzing, stopped worrying about how it would turn out and trained myself to live moment to moment, savoring each aspect of this new world Angel had opened up for me. Why would I ruin today worrying about what could happen tomorrow?

But tomorrow did come, not so much for me, but for Gia.

For only the second time since I met her, Angel was not shouting or screaming at me – she was shouting and screaming at Gia.

Angel had decided, entirely randomly and out of the blue that Gia was after her boyfriend. Mind you that Angel was the one that spent who knows how long convincing prudish Gia to even contemplate giving me the amazing birthday present they had given me. Yes, it took an extreme level of love bombing for Angel to get Gia, a girl I dated and who I knew hated talking about sex due to her past, to do what she did. It was Angel’s idea that we live together, work together and go out clubbing together so how could she possibly make Gia feel bad for doing what Angel had in fact orchestrated herself??

Well, because she was Angel.

She knew, better than anyone I knew, how to make a person feel guilty, to feel shame for carrying out an action that she technically had to brainwashed them to do in the first place.

The truth was, Gia had no interest in trying to steal me from Angel, if anything she had become obsessed with Angel. Logic would say if anyone had a right to go off on a jealous rage – it would be me, but there was no room for logic in Angel’s messed up brain.

She screamed at Gia, flung accusations viciously at her assaulting her with contempt and rage and no matter how hard Gia tried, begged for Angel to listen to reason – Angel refused. There was no logical explanation for what she was doing and sadly beneath the rage as she screamed, I could catch glimpses of this twisted smirk as if she was thoroughly enjoying the emotional warfare she had begun with no reason. Not only did she make false accusations but on top of it, she used personal, delicate information about Gia, information that was shared in trust and used her past pains to make her feel worthless and pathetic.

The more I tried to defend Gia the more she screamed at the both of us until I watched her berate this loving and decent person who she sent running from the house in tears. Gia is a tough girl, by no means is she a cry baby so it took a LOT of very personal and accurately aimed nastiness to reduce Gia to that state. It was a quick surgical strike designed to inflict as much hurt as possible and even I did not hear from Gia for a full 2 weeks. She was deeply hurt as the false accusations and insults came out of nowhere, it was a total sucker punch in the face.

After a couple of weeks Gia contacted me and spoke to me about the incident. She was still hurt and confused. I called Angel and told her that Gia would be arriving at the apartment and she owed her an apology. Angel genuinely seemed as if she could not even quite place WHAT she would need to apologize to Gia for, it was as if whenever she did something awful to someone her mind would erase the memory completely so that the other person was left wounded and suffering for days while she woke up the next day as if nothing had ever happened.

Vicious arguments that could cut a person to the core, leaving emotional scars that would take days to heal never affected Angel; that same argument would literally be something that required an effort of concentration for Angel to understand that the other person is hurting and SHE caused it and SHE should be the one to make an effort to heal those wounds.

Gia arrived at the apartment with a very brave face on, it was clear she had spent the majority of the past two weeks crying. She was guarded and had a wall around her heart, I couldn’t blame her since just two weeks prior Angel had run it through with a sabre. My heart broke at the sight of her, tiny loving Gia. I had been assaulted for years by Angel with those same vicious arguments that were flung at me out of nowhere, I licked my wounds alone never receiving any consolation or validation from Angel – and I’m ok with that; but I refused to allow her to do that to someone else, especially not to Gia.

Angel arrived at the apartment all regal and looking amazing and immediately apologized profusely to Gia and was immediately love bombing her all over again. It started the second she walked into the room, she engaged in an epic barrage of nuclear grade love bombing – and Gia was living these past few weeks with an emotional drought like state so it was exactly what she was so desperate for. She was desperate to hear that Angel had just had a moment of “stupidity” that she deeply, deeply regretted it and that she had not been able to sleep sine it happened and that she hadn’t reached out because she was too scared of what Gia would say.

Lies, lies and more lies flowed smoothly out of her red matted lips. Each day that I brought it up and reminded her she should apologize she had stormed around pissed off at having to be reminded of something her mind had already erased. Each time I tried to reason with her about doing the right thing only sent her on a vicious tangent. And then after calming down she would look at me bewildered and ask “what am I supposed to apologize for again? When did it happen??”

And yet she sounded so sincere so convincing that for a moment I began to doubt my memory of her behavior these past two weeks, maybe she was just irritated about something else, maybe I was hounding her too much about it, maybe…why am I even trying to make excuses for her?

It’s because of her performance right now; It seemed so genuine, she was being so kind and owning up for her terrible behavior. Gia was buying it and so was I, little did we both know that she was simply reeling Gia in so that in another 3 weeks or so she could do the exact same thing over and over again.

It took me a couple of months to figure out why Angel was doing this and it hurts to know that the conclusion I reached was that it was done purely to torture ME. How do I know this?

Despite the girls being alone together for at least 8 hours a day, EVERY incident took place in front of me and EVERY incident took place in English and for the first couple of times I was defending Gia. NATURALLY I was defending Gia – she was totally innocent – but unknowingly I had been playing into Angel’s plan.

She wanted MY heart cut to shreds in empathy with poor Gia who had been emotionally destroyed AND the double whammy victory of being able to directly torture me for sticking up for Gia, obviously standing up for her was held up as proof that I was in fact having a “thing” and I was being unfaithful to Angel. This was absolutely ludicrous and she KNEW it. Angel was not jealous, she knew there was no way in a thousand years that I would leave her for Gia, something incidentally, I most certainly SHOULD have done in hindsight. Gia is a loving, decent person – admittedly a very loud, loves to shout, loving, decent person but a loving, decent person none the less.

The three of us stayed on that emotional rollercoaster together, some weeks we were soaring high, life and then out of nowhere, and without any obvious logical reasoning suddenly we were plunging to near death lows. Now, I had grown accustomed to this behavior and it’s sad to say that it had become my “normal,” but watching Gia go through it was a whole new experience for me, and Angel for that matter.

After the 7th destruction of Gia, when I noticed Angel starting another love bombing session – I pulled her aside and told her to categorically stop.

“Stop what?” She asked playfully as if she had no idea what I was talking about. I looked through the doorway and saw Gia sitting on the couch, her earplugs in.

“If you don’t stop what you’re doing with her,” I said in a low and stern voice. “I’m going to go to the police and tell them how you illegally used the company stamp and forged my signature on legal documents,” I couldn’t believe that I had to threaten her in order to show her there would be severe consequences to her emotional abuse on Gia. Her smirk faded and her eyes darkened, but I could see her doubting my threat.

Illegally using a company’s stamp was a big crime in Bulgaria and I knew she didn’t want a record, but she knew how much I loved her and she knew how much I was prepared to forgive; she did however, miscalculate one thing.

She was thinking of the things she did to ME that I was prepared to forgive. Gia was over using drugs as a result of Angel’s abuse and Gia had a 6-year-old boy to look after – she was a lovely person who had been manipulated into a position she had never asked for and above all Gia was my friend and there was no way on Earth Angel was doing it another time. I was fully prepared to put Angel in JAIL to prevent it from happening again.

“You better stop torturing that poor girl NOW.”

“I’m not torturing anybody, that’s ridiculous,” she said a smile on her face, she put a delicate hand on my shoulder. I grabbed her wrist and held it firmly – I didn’t want to hurt her but I desperately wanted her to understand that I was not playing.

Again she denied it so I methodically gave her a play by play of every manipulative tactic she had been dishing out to Gia.

I may have trained myself over time to become an empath but I was very well aware of the manipulative tactics I myself had engaged in during my pre-empath days. I’m proud of the internal changes I made in myself and life as an empath is a nicer one than life as a sociopath AND there is the benefit that I can still use all those skills learned as a sociopath for business. Essentially business IS sociopathy.

I often tell people I don’t like business and they laugh – how could someone so driven and so successful at so many businesses not LOVE business. Nope – business is easy for sociopaths, for sociopaths it’s like a 7-foot guy playing basketball – the odds are highly in his favor – it’s not a challenge. Business is the “sport” of sociopaths – only we don’t get an Olympics.

So I knew EXACTLY what Angel was doing in manipulating Gia, what I did not know from my own past sociopathy I had learned from reading about narcissists. One thing that truly stood out was the fact that narcissists and sociopaths are far more dissimilar than you might think.

Sociopaths have a MOTIVE OF GAIN for their actions, we don’t do it for pleasure or to make up for some lack of self-worth. We do it to GET something, if we can get it without hurting someone we will, the only issue is if we have to hurt someone to get what we want – well, we will.

BUT the end ALWAYS justifies the means to a sociopath. We don’t gaslight and or engage in crazy making – that’s a long term strategy and our goals are way more short term than that.

Angel listened intently to every syllable of every word I said as I described what she was doing to Gia and why she was doing it. She was in absolute disbelief – total 100% shock and awe that another human being could have actually KNOWN her thinking and her tactics.

It was definitely the first time in her life that it had happened and it shook her to the very core of her being. She has played her games with people’s lives for however long she had been doing it and all that time she believed she was flying in the stratosphere way, way above ANYONE’S ability to understand or comprehend her actions. In her delusion she was all powerful, all knowing, SUPERIOR and her entire universe of utter superiority had just come CRASHING DOWN!

Here I was telling her exactly what she was doing – I was even naming the techniques she was using and giving examples of how else they should be used. She didn’t even know these games of hers had NAMES, she didn’t that they could be used in different ways to the ones she used them in.

I could see that she was aware that I knew MORE about what she was doing, about her secret games than NO ONE else knew, in fact I knew more about them than SHE did; that was like a J-DAM bomb detonating within her ego.

She did not say a word, she just listened with genuine wonder in her eyes, both fascinated and horrified at the same time. To her, it was like a gruesome car crash unfolding in slow motion before her eyes. She listened for 2 hours in total silence – a record by 1 hour and 59 minutes and thirty seconds.

She didn’t argue, contradict, deny and she walked away making no claim about stopping or not; she just walked away shell shocked and went straight to bed.

She never mentioned it again – and she never played another mind game with Gia in any way, shape or form. She treated her as a friend, in fact she was reasonably considerate towards her and there was never again any evidence of torture.

It was as if it would be embarrassing to Angel to continue KNOWING that I would be watching and I would know exactly what she was doing, as if it degraded the actions somehow.

I wonder sometimes if this was the day that truly sealed my fate – did detonating that J-DAM bunker buster bomb right in the very heart of Angel’s ego, thereby destroying the one thing she truly though made her SPECIAL, placed her way above everyone else- was that when the turning point came about? Did destroying image, forcing her to realize that – actually, I’m just as good as you are at this, if not better and YOU thought I had absolutely no clue you were even doing it – DID THAT massive insult seal my fate?? Things were rough before this day – but after it they were NASTY.