I've been having a bit of a brain fart lately when it comes to writing, but I wanted to get something out there, so here we go.
There are some friendships that last a lifetime.
It's kind of that simple. I met Luis Ruuska in the 7th grade and really had no strong opinions of him at the time. (Sorry Luis.) That changed over the course of middle school, into high school, and then in 10th grade, he moved away, never to be seen again.
The thing about Luis is that he's the type of person you don't need to talk to every day to be friends with. Which is good. Over the past 7-8 years (it's been a long day and math is hard) we would text every now and then, even if it was just memes. He became my go-to person about Adult Things, because Luis always seemed to have his life together and be twenty steps ahead of me. I mean, he adopted a dog. A dog!! One day I'll own my own dog.
It might not have been the most consistent friendship, but it was a good one.
In December I received a text from Luis that said something along the lines of:
Hey I'm going to be in the Bay Area in January and we should catch up!
Luis Ruuska!
It was thrilling, honestly. How many people move away in 10th grade never to be seen again until you move to the complete opposite side of the country, have both graduated with degrees, and are just living your life? I think he reads this blog, so this'll probably be weird for him, but whatever (again, Sorry Luis).
At first it was a bit awkward. We'd literally been 15/16 when we'd last seen each other and we're both in our 20s now, and people change. I was expecting things to be a lot different. But, despite growing up, despite life taking us in different directions, we were still Luis and Jenn from 7th grade.
It was raining and hard to pick a place but we found some pizza and had some cider and caught up.
Luis: do I look any different
me: not really
Luis: okay
It's one thing to reconnect via Twitter, it's another to see the person in the flesh. I know, now more than ever, that Luis is going to be one of those forever friendships, whether we're talking every day or not.
Friendship in general, however, is something that I tend to struggle with.
Unless I've known you since basically the beginning of dawn, getting me to open up and connect is worse than pulling teeth. It takes a lot of push for me to become personally invested in other people
(2018 is all about living your truth which involves a lot more self-reflection and self-analysis than I'd originally anticipated, so here we go. My therapist tells me I'm very self-aware. I think she thinks I'm crazy.)
It's not that I don't care about people as a whole. I really do. I'm incredibly empathetic to the point where sometimes I'm not even sure how it is that I'm feeling, I'm just feeling things for other people. I also genuinely believe that people are good. It's easy to look at the world and talk about how awful it is and how negative things are guiding our every day lives, but at the root of it all, I seriously believe that people are good.
But to me, friendship is a two way street. That means while I'm accepting pieces of another person into my heart, they should be accepting those pieces of me into theirs. Which, that's how friendship works, obviously. But at the same time, that's so fucking scary. When I open up to people and give them parts of my story so they can peer into the depths of my thoughts and my history and what makes me who I am, you can't take it back. It's theirs now, and what they do with that information is something that you just have to trust they won't take advantage.
It's more than that, though. When you give pieces of yourself to someone, what happens when they decide they don't want them anymore? It's not like they can give it back to you. Maybe they move away, or maybe they move on, or maybe something awful happens and they're just gone. But there are so many ways in which someone can end up be never to be seen again. And that's scary too. Because in that situation, not only are pieces of yourself also gone, but you have all these pieces of other people that you don't know what to do with anymore.
Friendship is difficult for me at times.
Much like it's said in Harry Potter, there are some things that bond people forever.
Like the entire experience of freshman year (Casey) or raising a group of 9 young adults together (Charlie) or sharing a bed in a house full of near-strangers on the beach (Annie). There are dozens of humans I could list here (and I can already see Robyn calling me out for not getting a name drop seeing as I'll be literally living in her house - I see you) and all of them are so important to me in so many ways.
It's not like I didn't know it before, but I'm really learning to make friendship a central pillar in my life. But not just friendship, and this is going to sound cheesy as hell, but I'm really learning to make love a central pillar.
The thing about love, especially when you're 22, is that it's so easy to want to find a significant other. Like, who doesn't want to be loved? I'm a goddamn hopeless romantic and want to be smothered in attention. It's simple to think of love as something that can only be romantic.
But I love my friends. So much. So much that there aren't enough words for it. And I love animals, small wiggly creatures that exist on this planet to bring joy to us. And I love being a woman, marching with my housemates for recognition and equality. And I love looking at all of the hard things in life and morphing them into something that can help me grow into someone stronger.
The world is hard. The news is stressful. But as we go deeper into January (which literally has just been dragging on forever) I make sure to take time out of my day, every day, to reflect on the things and the people that I love, the things and the people that I'm thankful for.
I hope you have that, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment