do you believe you can walk on water?

Attempted suicide is used as a manipulation tactic in this. Tread carefully nonetheless if you're particularly sensitive to such topic.

"I need your help!"
It was the evening of 2 March, 2024. Ren and I were spending some time together since it was a rare weekend off for me. Snuggling in bed, pondering what to have for dinner, what we should watch next... Until she turned to me and said, "I think Egg is calling for you."
Pause YouTube. Listen harder. Ren's hearing is better than mine is, so at first I didn't hear anything at all. Until...
"[Dead name]! I need your help!"
The last time Egg had done something like this, it wasn't even an emergency, or mildly important. Egg liked to make the most trivial and mundane of matters into earth shattering, "the world is ending" disaster scenarios, when all she needs is a money transfer from her bank account. Or a bill double checked. Certainly not something dire.

So, because it's never anything important, but she thought everything was important, I more or less ignored it. After it, she probably wanted something that could certainly wait until tomorrow.
The annoyance at being ignored was clear in her voice when she shouted again, "I need your help! I tried to kill myself!"
I will admit, I nearly passed out at that. It led to me wondering why on earth she was shouting up to me about it when the phone was right there and she could make a phone call to 9-1-1 herself? After all if she was at the foot of the stairs, and shouting up with several minutes in between each time, it couldn't be that dire.
I don't do well with situations like this, so Aleks ended up taking over, because he is made for these situations.

Aleks and Ren looked over the banister. Egg was at the bottom, looking calm and collected and like she was waiting for a package to arrive. As Aleks and Ren debated whether a call to EMS was necessary, she shouted up again that she needed help. So Ren and Aleks made their way down the stairs, where Egg was standing.
No blood.
No gaping wounds.
Nothing that seemed to be an emergency.
She watched as Aleks took a seat on one of the steps, Ren standing not far from the bottom herself.
"I tried to kill myself." She sounded like she was describing the weather.
"Okay," Aleks said, reacting calmly. "Do you need EMS?"
"I took a knife," she continued, ignoring him, "and tried to--" She made a cutting motion across her neck.
"Do you wanna see the knife? The cuts?" She sounded giddy at the prospect of showing off her self harm wounds and the item she used to create them. Something was definitely off.
"No, I don't need to see--why are you asking that?" Something was definitely off to Aleks, even more so now. "Do you need us to call for an ambulance?"
Egg seemed hesitant. Guarded. "Well, I don't know. It depends."

( Read more... )

The first noticeable sign of her lack of compassion was probably when she got news that her brother died on 18 January, 2024. Admittedly I didn't really know my uncle much; the last visit we'd ever had was when I was young and we still had parties for different things like birthdays and Christmas. And even then I didn't really know him. My brothers had spent more time with him in their youth than I did in my whole life, for example, so my eldest brother was (understandably) devastated by the news. Even so, I still felt a twinge of sadness considering how strained things were between him and my aunt, and how he was all but written out of the family by everyone else. The sadness was due to things being irreparably broken and now forever so. No way to even attempt to fix things or exchange apologies.

Not terribly long before this, I'd decided to reconnect with my older brother, whom I hadn't talked to in 5 years at that point. I couldn't really remember why we'd stopped talking, just that Egg had something to do with it. Between different things she'd told me he'd (allegedly) said about me, to different things he'd (allegedly) written in a letter to her, I guess those were maybe some of the reasons. So I'd reached out on Facebook Messenger and was waiting for some kind of response from him. The news of my uncle passing only reinforced my feeling of "making the correct choice" in trying to make things right between us again. My brother isn't exactly old but he also wasn't young and you know what? Tomorrow isn't guaranteed for anyone. He could be dead tomorrow. Did I really want to keep this silence between us and, by the time I finally bit the bullet and tried, find out that it was too late?

So when Egg told me this news I said, "Oh! I'm sorry to hear that." I asked how she found that out, and it was through Golden Son. Nothing else was known (what he died of, etc). Egg said, in a wistful sort of way almost, "It's a shame that things ended the way they did. We were so close at one point and then everything else happened." From the outside looking in, one might think she was expressing some form of regret. Her tone was wrong for that sort of thing, considering I was expecting an "oh well!" to get added to the end. She didn't seem terribly bothered the more time elapsed between the news and her letting me know, and her going back to whatever she was doing.

Which is strange, to me at least. This was her brother whom she was really close to growing up and even throughout early adulthood. Despite whatever happened between the two of them (and the rest of the family), that's still her brother. It seemed "off" to me that she wasn't more upset, that it was more like she heard on the news that tomorrow would be rain showers and oh, isn't that depressing?

Some people are in shock when they hear news like this, so maybe that was it? I thought. But when I told other people the news, even people who'd never met him or, indeed, had no idea I even had any uncles, they seemed a lot more upset and concerned than Egg. Even I was more upset than Egg.

This is how Egg reacted to her mother passing, to her father passing, to all of her relatives passing. In Egg's own words, she was "extremely close" to my grandmother in particular, and yet the one who nearly collapsed from grief at her funeral was me. Not Egg, who didn't seem bothered in the least.

Now prior to all of this my mother-in-law passed, and right before Thanksgiving no less. And Egg, upon hearing the news when I told her, seemed completely unbothered by it. She said something to the effect of, "Now it's all over," and whether that was about Eileen's suffering or something else, I don't know. She not once offered condolences to me or my wife, whose mom it was who passed. Nothing. Not even an "I'm sorry to hear that." The only thing I was asked about was whether or not my wife was left any inheritance, and if so, how much. As if my wife gave a fuck about that a couple of days after her mom died and was buried!

Here is an important fact about Egg: she only cares about things with dollar signs stuck in front of them. She has lived off of the estates of both her deceased husband and her deceased parents the past 20+ years total. We went without a lot of things because she refused to seek out and obtain gainful employment, giving excuse after excuse on why she couldn't do that, all so she could continue to hoard her dead husband's money for her own selfish purposes. She is a dragon guarding her mountain of gold coins. For what purpose? I have no idea. Maybe she thinks she can take whatever money she amasses and hoards with her to the afterlife. I don't know.

Egg asked my wife to do something major for her and my wife told her she couldn't do it because she was busy grieving over her mom's death and could barely focus on the things she was supposed to (like work)...and all Egg said was, "That has nothing to do with me."
Maybe not, but anyone with even an ounce of compassion would be understanding enough to go, "Ah, yes, take all the time you need, I'll figure something out."
But not Egg.
Never Egg.
Egg, who feels like the world revolves around her and we're all her willing servants at her beck and call day and night, finds someone choosing themself over her "unacceptable".

My wife was too focused on grieving to call about getting the driveway extended. Egg pitched a fit over it and then came after me, saying how horrible a spouse I am for not getting the driveway taken care of.
As if I give a fuck about a driveway for a property I don't even own when my mother-in-law passed away and I have to be there for my wife and support her emotionally with her grieving.
Egg, who feels like the world revolves around her and we're all just paying rent to be here, that we're volunteers who wear many hats and are willing to do whatever job she demands of us, finds someone choosing their wife, the most important person in their life, "unacceptable".

We'll get back to that though. There is a lot to be said about that.