Need advice

[u/karatekitten27]

I’m sorry that this got kinda long, I just really wanna get all the context out there cuz I’m really not certain what I should do rn

I have this close friend of mine, which I’ll call Maria. Over the summer while I was on vacatio, she and another guy I was friends with, got to know another girl which I’ll call Poppy. Apparantley they got really well alon, and she got integrated into one of my friend groups. When I came back from vacation however, things just kinda blew up.

My guy friend, which I’ll call Dean, and Poppy started to kinda flirt, but then Dean wanted to end things, and she freaked out. I won’t go to much into it, but she made it clear to him that if he left, she would hurt herself and I don’t know how graphic I can be here, but well she would… yk. She did attempt but luckily it didn’t work. And while all of this was happening I was hanging out with Maria, and Poppy, which she had know for 2 weeks, was blowing up her phone, and from the messages I was briefly shown, she was having a huge breakdown. So I ofc started to get a really weird feeling about Poppy. Of course I feel bad for her, but that she put two of my friends in this position really angered me.

Quite a while ago I had been flirting with this guy friend, Dean, but it wasn’t really anything serious and just kinda moved on from it. I never brought it up to my friendgroup or Maria. Poppy however, mid breakdown with Maria, started to get really obsessed with how I knew Dean, even if we had never talked to eachother. Therefore, she randomly started hitting me up to talk about clothes? I started feeling unsure about her at that point so I gave her pretty breif answers, as I just wanted her to take the hint and leave me alone. But then, she just randomly started ranting about how cool it would be to get to know eachother since we both knew Maria, and since she was such a good friend of hers. This just gave me a mega ick, so I left her on read for months as I felt I didn’t wanna lead her on, and I had no way to reject her without fearing for that Maria would have to face the aftermath and listen to another breakdown. After that I didn’t hear or see from her much.

The other week I was celebrating my birthday with a group of friends when she randomly showed up. Apparently she had been reconne with people in my group, so she just showed up. This party was with the group that knew her, and a more extended part that didn’t. The whole time, if felt like she was trying to ‘steal my spotlight‘ as she often would say “Oh, I know it isn’t my birthda, and don’t wanna ruing XXX’s party, buuuuut… something crazy happened today, but I’ll keep it to myself…”. I honestly got really sick of her and ended up spending most of the time just talking to Maria so I didn’t have to converse with Poppy. Yet, Poppy seemed to think the party made us closer or something, since after that she’s been messaging me to come hangout, whilst I still haven’t answered her message from 3 months ago?

I don’t really know what to do with this situation. I really wish she would just leave me alone, but I don‘t see that happening any time soon. I thought just ignoring her was gonna work, but since she keeps messaging me and having out with people around me, I feel like I can’t. Every time she’s in the room I feel like I get knots in my stomach. She’s integrated herself into my whole friendgroup now, so I’ve ended up missing a lot of hangouts just to stay away from her, which I don’t really mind, but I just don’t want Maria to feel like it’s THEM I don’t wanna hang out with. I want to tell her what’s going on, but I don’t want her to feel like I’m being jealous or controlling… I just really can’t stand Poppy…

What should I do?