March 7, 2023:
She lied, habitually and self-righteously, as though claiming the right to lie and daring anyone to disagree.
She lied to her father. "I'm living in my car and you won't help me." In fact she lived with me and I helped her with tens of thousands of dollars of dental and psychiatric bills, clothing, road trips, dinners out. Her father was experienced and sophisticated enough to see through her. I was slow to get there.
She lied to her aunt, her brother, her former housemates, my friends, servers at restaurants, doctors and dentists and psychiatrists. Often so transparently that they must have realized. The psychiatrists, certainly.
Lies are the weapons of the weak, a form of asymmetrical warfare. Where her weaknesses were resentment and envy and hubris, and debilitating ADHD which left her virtually incapable of processing information.
This was our life together at its most benign, that is, in the quiet moments between outbursts of vicious verbal abuse I learned to expect at near random.