I'm largely okay with my friends hanging around with people I've cut out of my life because the reasons I ended those friendships were personal to my situation, but there's a guy who gets grosser the longer I reflect on him and it baffles me that they still invite him around.

Generally I like to hear that people have gotten better, goodness knows we were all monsters growing up, but I'm under the impression this guys problems ran pretty deep and what little I've heard about him in the last few years hasn't been encouraging.

I fixate on this guy, because he hurt me which sometimes seems like a reason my friends discount my opinion of him. Which I understand. While I was friends with him I was like that. He'd hurt people, and I'd stay friends with him because it didn't effect me directly.

A brief aside, microaggressions is a term for the way hateful beliefs leak out or are reinforced in subtle ways and it's something I've been vaguely aware of forever because I have to proactively read between the lines of social interactions as an autistic person.

I bring that up because initially part of the appeal of my friendship with this horrible guy was picking apart the disconnect between the polite confident person he presented as, the manipulative insecure person he was underneath, and the nihilism that lurked even further down.

He is very charming, gets caught up in new projects, and is a good listener. But every so often he'd intentionally hurt someone, usually a girl he was involved with. You wouldn't hear about it until after it happened, and you'd have to read between the lines to learn more.

The few times he talked openly about what he was up to were gross in hindsight. I remember him boasting about how he lied about his virginity in college to get pity fucks, or having coerced a lesbian who was in a relationship to have sex with him. He was proud of these things.

He liked manipulating people. I think it made him feel powerful and validated his low opinion of himself. That sort of sad boy shit where you feel like you're a bad person so you bad things so you can keep feeling bad. Eventually he settled into a long term relationship though.

For about four years he was dating this one girl and using every trick in his book to prolong that relationship. I don't know if he ever cheated on her, but if he didn't it would have been a first for him. Despite being close during that time I only met her twice.

After that relationship fizzled out in carefully constructed silence, he started subtly harassing me. By now he knew I was reading between the lines and used it for plausible deniability. I wish I knew what gaslighting was then because he was a master of it.

What sticks with me though was the last phone call I had with him after our friendship ended. His final question to me was "Why couldn't I predict you?" Which is just about the creepiest thing anyone has ever asked me, and says a lot about how this guy operates.

Dangerous is a word that often conjures up imagery of action movie levels of peril, but I would still describe him as such. He never gave a reason for deceiving and manipulating people, and even now I don't know why he did it to me either.

So when I see people I care about around him, it's not just that they're hanging around someone I'd rather avoid it's that I'm genuinely worried what this guy might eventually do to them.