sad news

This time last year I blogged extensively about a friend who continued making awful choices and my somewhat frantic pleas for her to get her life back on track. While she knew that all I said to be true, she didn't really want to change. One night I had a particular dream, and I relayed this dream to her: in the dream, I met up with her countless years down the road at an Applebee's on the city's outskirts and I felt nothing but pity for her. She'd continued making bad choices, and the consequences of this life had caught up with her. When I told her about this dream, she laughed, and she told her cousin, "He's pretty crazy." A month or two later I decided to "cut off" my relationship with her (in a sense), because my love for her was going to be my own self-destruction. A wise old man told me, "Don't let yourself be destroyed by her." I'm not God and I don't pretend to be, so I cut things off. My sister remains friends with her, and she called me the other day relaying all that's happened. Everything (and I mean everything) encapsulated in the dream came true (except for one thing, which is like the "climax" of it all, the goal or telos of a ruined life). Maybe the dream was prophetic, maybe it was just coincidence, but nevertheless: it's sad to see someone you love embrace bad decision after bad decision to only self-implode, caving in on themselves, becoming more and more Augustine's homo incurvatus en se: "human beings curved in on themselves." Such a lifestyle of rotten and evil choices is the yellow brick road to a dehumanized person and a wasted, ruined life, and my heart is filled with sadness over it all. But what can you do? I said what needed to be said; I was there for her more than anyone; I was by her side through thick and thin, and I remained so when almost everyone else got fed up and left her. Sometimes the only purpose in telling someone the truth is so that when the truth comes to bear on them fully and finally, they'll have no wiggle room to try and squeeze free of the blame.