January 7, 2022:
I suppose the greatest of all my mistakes was in imagining we knew one another.
From my side of the barricade: it's not possible to know someone who habitually lies. Even that truism is understated. When someone lies with every other breath, there literally is no-one there to encounter. There are words without substance, an ever-shifting surface without depth, a human body without insides, without identity, without content. There's no person there capable of being known.
From her side: no matter how much I struggled to share myself it was impossible in the face of narcissism that intense. I could talk and talk and talk, reveal and reveal and reveal. She wouldn't hear, because she was listening to herself, and to herself only.
We were false from the first day, because there was no "we", because it never could have been possible for there to have been a "we".