I've done a lot of thinking tonight. And some talking to God. For the first time in a while, I felt like He really heard me. I know He always hears me, but head knowledge and spiritual feeling are different things. Sometimes it just feels like going through the motions, but not accomplishing anything. But tonight I felt like He was my best friend sitting right next to me. I knew without a doubt that He was crying with me.

For the first time, I finally cried about this. I don't know, maybe I've been too angry up until now. (Not to say I'm not angry. It's just not the emotion that won out this time.) I didn't sit there sobbing, it was just quiet tears of pain as I told God what was on my heart.

I almost feel bad saying that I'm hurting, when there are other people so much closer to this situation than I, who are hurting far worse. That's why I can't comprehend that kind of pain, because I know how much it hurts just for me.

You think someone is your friend. For several years, you get to know each other, talk, hang out, and spend so much time in each other's lives, only to find out suddenly that every bit of it was a lie. We supposedly had a pretty close friendship. And now I find out that I was even talked about behind my back. And it hurts because I thought I was talking to a close friend, who I trusted. Who lied through their teeth when they told me that they respected me. You don't go talking bad about a close friend whom you respect. So that was lies to my face, too.

I thought about all the awesome, fun times we had together. They brought smiles, and then tears. Because there were so many of them, but they will never happen again. None of them. And the thing that really gets me is that that person has manipulated, lied to, broken promises, and betrayed the trust of every single person in their life, but... don't care. It just doesn't matter to them. Selfish worldliness won, not loyalty and friendship. The choice to throw away everything good for something far more temporary than they realize was more appealing.

When you have a good friend that suddenly stabs you in the back and leaves after showing their true colors (i.e.: the person that they hid so well for so long), it deeply hurts. You grieve. You mourn, just as if that person were dead.

Truth be told, the person I knew is dead. Not physically. But our friendship was a lie. And to find that out after three or four years is hard. And then when things surfaced that were said behind my back... it seems that that person never really was the person I thought I knew in the first place. But did happen to be a heck of an actor.

And that hurts.