So, as it turns out, one of my best friends (at one point in time, my best friend, but then we had a falling out a bloody eight months ago. Since then, we have come to a reconciliation but not an actual confrontation of the... "fight") has a girlfriend. I discovered this through seeing his hand intertwined with a girl's - a girl who I've met once in my life, and whose name I cannot spell (Ava? Eva? It's pronounced "Ay-vah"). In any case, I went over to his new house this Friday (he moved away from our neighborhood around a month ago), and between racing against my physic's assignment deadline and eating crappy pizza out of desperation, I noted a hickey-like bruise on his neck. And lo! and behold. It was a hickey.
Thank you, friend, for telling me about this relationship of yours. I totally feel as though we're as tight as tight can possibly be. (This sentence is delivered with supersaturated amounts of sarcasm.)
It makes me, along with several single-ers, how the hell are we still single? Though, rationality tells me that:
- We've declined several individuals for the sake of retaining the potential of finding that special one. (Okay, maybe this is more like me.)
- We haven't met the one yet. And we're not desperate. And we're not bound to leap onto the first person who makes eye-contact with us.
- We have school on our priorities list, amongst other things. A romantic relationship would mutate this fine equilibrium of life we have semi-established.
It still doesn't make me, and presumably the others, feel better.
I'm in the slumps. I want someone to take care of me. My friends are not available enough. I love them, and vice versa, but distance (and apparently, a significant other) sets boundaries. I know that my friends have people at their universities who take care of them in ways that I can't - like buying chocolates, or reminding (and most likely, forcibly relaxing them) about an exam, or doing those random, special acts of friendship. I have no intention of making new friends of this kind. The guilt factor kicks in, where you feel as though you're replacing your best friends. (Imagine having them meet each other on long holidays. Awkward.) But an equal, or bigger, reason why I cannot let someone be close to me is because I can't invest in any more people. By invest, I mean "impart dependence, loyalty and love". I have had a lot of friends who have let me down, and I expect a lot from my best friends. And they expect a lot from me. Being there for more people would take too much out of me - I can help to an extent, but I won't reach out of my comfort zone too much. I also realize that I have to live up to the normal ShufflingHard Standard around my other friends: I have to be mature, motherly, most times funny, witty, the conversationalist. It's tiring to live up to this. What if I don't want to tell you why you're depressed? Or that life will be okay, and that, eventually, our exams are going to be over with? Or that phalanges are the technical and anatomically correct name for fingers, so shouldn't it be spelled filanges (and henceforth, fingers be spelled phingers?).
You know you're my friend when I ask you for things. I give comfort and friendship much more easily (a shitload more easily) than I allow myself to receive it.
In any case, somewhere in my subconsciousness, I've deducted the solution that meets the criterium:
- I get comfort; someone to take care of me, in ways that my friends from afar cannot.
- I don't make more friends.
- I can be me again. No pretense.
The solution: get a boyfriend!
Bad, bad subconsciousness! I've read in journals that the subconsciousness formulates alternative brain pathways to come up with a solution in ways that the consciousness couldn't. So this is what I get? It makes sense though. I had this problem in the summer, where all the sadness and anticipation of my friends leaving influenced a similar mindset. But there you go.
- ShufflingHard
