I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the last few weeks. When C passed away, G and D got back in touch with me. We’ve been chatting a bit and some things have come to light. What I thought I knew to be the truth may not be what actually was.

In my post Where have all the good friends gone? I had written about what had happened with my two best friends ever, C and G, and why I haven’t spoken to either of them in years. I was certain that what I knew was truth, and it was just the way it was.

But then D, G’s wife, reached out to me online when C passed away, and we chatted. And I enjoyed speaking with her, because it had been so long. She told me that her husband, G, wanted to reach out. Losing old friends makes you think about things, including other old friends. I told her I’d like it if he did, and she gave me his phone number and I gave her mine to pass along.

Since then, we’ve chatted back and forth quite a bit. And during that chatting, first, I realized just how much I missed my friends. I also found out that my ex-wife, the impetus for us not talking anymore, was keeping them from talking to me. She was apparently telling them SOMETHING and saying it was just better if they didn’t speak to me at all. And apparently, when she found out that G was thinking about reaching out to me upon the news of C’s passing, she upped the ante a bit and told them not to.

This took me by surprise. What reason could she have that she absolutely doesn’t want us talking? I didn’t ask what exactly she had told them about me, but apparently once we started talking whatever she had said started falling apart. Just some comments that were made left me with the impression that she had made me out to be something I am not. G and D told me that I was not the picture that my ex had painted me as. Her and I divorced back in the early 2000s, and I had stopped speaking with G and D a few years before that. So before this its been over 20 years since we have spoken and the fact that she had been making me out to be the bad guy all of this time, its very upsetting. Especially all the times that I have gone out of my way to help her. And I’m some bad guy.

And this. This got me thinking. If she has gone this far, if she has apparently been telling falsehoods about me to keep G and D from reaching out to me, how much of what she told me about the whole situation, the very reasons why I have not reached out in over 2 decades, how much of that could be something invented for the very reason to make me not want to talk to them? I mean, I know SOME of it happened, because D had told me as much back all of those years ago. But what don’t I know? What did she say to them that let things go down the way they did? What did she say to them afterwards? How much of what she told ME about the situation is a total falsehood?

I don’t know. And that’s the problem. I’ve always said that my ex-wife is a gifted liar. And she is. Did she just trick me into a 2 decade con, just so she could have who were originally my friends in our divorce? Did she invent things to make me not want to talk to them so she didn’t have to share? Or to choose me over her? I really don’t know.

So I’ve been wondering how many of the “facts” that were feed to me weren’t actually the facts. But, at the same time, I sort of don’t really want to know. I know I’m enjoying having G and D back in my life, what little bit it is at the moment. Now that we’re in touch, I realize just how much I’ve missed them. So, I don’t really want to open those old wounds. At this point, I am content to believe that the truth I was told may have been stretched beyond the breaking point, and I was hurting enough already to believe it.

That, and I’d much rather see how things can be with my friends in my life again.