But mostly, I was free of him. Free to heal from the ordeal of our two years together.
About a year-and-a-half after I moved out, I discovered a life-changing book called The Artist's Way. It introduced a new word into my vocabulary:
crazymaker: a person who drives you crazy with conflicting demands, mood swings, blame and drama, all of which cause you to stop pursuing dreams.It was the perfect description of Conspiracy. There was a word for him. He was a crazymaker, but he was also a steadfast and loyal friend. So we continued to talk.
Conspiracy was one of the few people I confided in when I first moved to Los Angeles and embarked on my casting-couch misadventures. I told him the whole dirty, nasty, horrifying story of how I went out with my agent. When I got to the part about being squirted in the face, Conspiracy interjected that my agent had perpetuated "some nasty porn sh*t" on me.
That conversation would come back to bite me in the ass, big time, several years later.
Flash forward to me in my early thirties. I was taking transformational seminars that required me to have difficult conversations with people with whom I had unfinished business.
My first such conversation with Conspiracy blew up spectacularly in my face. I wanted to talk about the ways he had controlled me and curtailed my growth. He went on the attack, making accusations so outlandish that all I could do was sputter incoherently.
He accused me of "flashing my vagina" at a friend of his – as in literally flopping down in a living-room chair and gapping my legs open. Worse, he claimed that I "deliberately hurt him" by "rubbing his face in" the fact that I whored myself out to my agent. Wait ... what? He was claiming that the pain I shared with him was now pain I caused him? (Crazymaking, crazymaking, crazymaking.)
My desire for a spiritual breakthrough was so great that I called him again.
This time, I acknowledged the role Conspiracy had played in getting me through college and that I probably would not have graduated without him. This time, he was touched. This time, our conversation was sweet and warm.
He wanted to see me again and catch up. He still had my naked pictures, and he wanted to return them to me in person. Enveloped in the sweet, warm glow, I promised that I would come visit him. I didn't say when, just that I would.
In the deepest part of my gut, however, I knew that I really didn't want to. I didn't want to deal with a former lover who still had feelings for me. I didn't want to risk ending up alone with him in the apartment we once shared. I didn't want to listen to any of his "they done me wrong" tirades.
So I never got around to visiting him.
Two years later, Conspiracy forced my hand in a way that neither or us expected.
