Enemy in Passing

I was focused on my work tasks when I encountered someone I once knew well. At least I thought I knew them well, but later I would realize I hadn’t known them well enough even in all the years I’d been around them.

I’d only come to realize with time, the person in passing was my enemy, and any time I’d encounter them, they’d forever be my enemy in passing. There would never be anything that would ever change that.

The enemy in passing didn’t like me but set out to befriend me anyway. I look back now and see this as such calculated energy to go after someone and make them the target of hatred, but this person was set on it.

Even still, I already knew something was off. I just couldn’t put my finger on it at the time. Knowing what I know now, that was all my discernment. That “off” feeling about them was a signal … many red flags even, but I didn’t listen or heed the warnings as clearly as I would now. I was too busy wanting to give them the benefit of doubt.

Enemies in passing are people I keep within my peripheral view now. I don’t readily engage with them because something always feels off. I later comprehend they were never my kind of people, and nothing immediately attracted me to them because we were never like spirits.

In fact, we never really had anything deeply in common, and this is why conversations with them always felt dry or forced. They were forcing themselves to like me because they had an agenda, and I was trying to understand them when I never truly would be allowed into their hearts.

Enemies in passing always managed to stay within the backdrop of my life until one day they realized they couldn’t stand it any longer. They’d always managed to find a way to bring themselves forth. They’d either get someone who had proximity to me to introduce me to them or they’d hang on until I was forced to notice them.

This particular enemy in passing that I’d encountered after a few years of not ever running into them, I was forced to notice, but all the while, they were inching their way closer to me because they really wanted to destroy me. They hated me from the start.

Hatred for someone whom one doesn’t even know is always weird energy to me. It’s like, what is the reason for such hatred? That’s the one thing I’ve come to learn about a lot of actual narcissists I’ve known. They hate another person just because there’s some innate quality that the person has that they don’t but wish they had.

Yet, instead of praising that person for that great quality, the narcissist hates them for it … and they go one step further with their hatred too. They actually go after this target to destroy them for that quality as well. As a matter of fact, they become so obsessed with the object of their hatred that they cease to view them as a person with feelings. Instead, they perceive them as a threat to their being and will do almost anything to get rid of them as a threat.

I’ve spent a lifetime of wondering how one can hate someone they really don’t know or even really want to get to know. It’s odd. When I think about it, this particular enemy in passing spent so much time getting close to me, spent so much time learning my likes and dislikes, spent so much time realizing that I was a person of empathy and compassion, and spent so much time trying to scrape from the surface of my life that they never cared that I was a real person who’d suffered tremendous pain.

Oddly, the pain of my life was something this enemy in passing never wanted to know. They didn’t care about me at all. I didn’t matter to them, and based on their behaviors that ran hot and cold towards me, it showed effortlessly. For the most part, they were after something else from me entirely.

Unfortunately for this enemy in passing, they never could quite get a grasp on what they truly wanted from me when they were around me, and the longer they came to know about me, the more they realized they’d never attain what they were truly after. They hadn’t figured that what they were after was actually an innate part of my being that could neither be duplicated nor manufactured for their own.

My essence is all me, and this enemy in passing could never have it no matter how close they came to believing they could attain it, no matter how much they tried to copy it or belittle it, and no matter how often they plotted to take me out in the process. When I realized this as I stood almost shoulder to shoulder with this enemy in passing and they weren’t even aware of my very presence, I realized a very important lesson of this reality.

Jesus had traveled the same road with people who saw him on the road to Emmaus, specifically Cleopas and another disciple. As much as they’d been around him, they didn’t even recognize him. Of course there are several reasons for this, such as divine intervention, a resurrected body, emotional distress and disbelief, and a lesson in faith. However, this experience had me realizing that if I hadn’t been this enemy’s target, then someone else would have been.

In that instant, while being literally shoulder to shoulder with an enemy in passing who hated me with as much intensity as she did in the past, it would have seemed to me that she would have looked at me in shock, but she never did. It was then that I realized that she didn’t know me, and she never had known me. She only saw something about me that she didn’t have that made me become her target.

So with time, this enemy in passing set out to destroy me … literally. Whatever it was that I possessed that she wanted made her so obsessed with me, that she settled upon pretending to befriend me only to take me down through superficial means by destroying me subtly but in psychologically abusive ways, financially, and when that didn’t completely work, she set out to poison me. When that didn’t work, she tried to literally disregard my very existence. But like a rock, I stood the test of time.

If it were not for the grace of God, I might have succumbed to this enemy’s plans for me, but I valued this person’s life a bit more than I valued my own at one time. I was so eager to give love because I determined she needed it, but I didn’t know anything. You can’t give love to someone who doesn’t know how to receive it. Nor can you give love to someone who clearly doesn’t know what love is either. If one’s heart is hardened against love, love will never go into their heart.

Like pigs, all an enemy will do will be to trample upon all the love you give to them underneath their feet because love literally means nothing to them. This is why I believe it’s important not to “cast your pearls before swine”. Those pearls will be destroyed. At worst, one’s love for an enemy might only even fuel more of their hatred and indifference. Such has been the case of my experiences.

So that by the time I did become indifferent towards this particular enemy, they realized that I had nothing left to give them. They had taken everything. I’m not sure if they were able to bask in that at all though. At this point, it no longer matters. Yet, when I personally saw them and stood shoulder to shoulder with them, I almost didn’t recognize them either. I took one look at this enemy and could tell that life has presumably worn them down, but at the same time, they appeared to be recapturing elements of a distant youth.

It was then that it dawned on me that this enemy was likely up to the same old tricks. They’d likely found a new target and had taken on the task of mimicking their new target. I could have almost past them by if it had not been for the fact that something felt familiar about them. Even though I briefly observed them via their movements, they still never gave me one look – never seemed to recognize me at all, but I knew them.

It was as if this enemy in passing I once knew was now a stranger who bypassed me without taking notice that I was someone they were once after in the most obsessive way, and I realized they didn’t recognize me because they never even knew me from the start. They were after something within me they’d never be able to attain. So it was easy to bypass me and I go unrecognized even if I still remembered them.

Yet, that’s just it. I remember them. I recognize them, but I don’t really know them. I feel nothing for them. No hate. No love. No nothing. It’s over, and I’ve gained the experience of knowing that this person will forever be in my life as an enemy in passing.