I’ve had a blog post stewing in my head all weekend. This is not that blog post (that one will be better organized and thought-out). This one hit me like a Mack truck on a dark road, and I’ve barely thought it out at all. I had an idea, I wanted to explore, I’m taking you along for the ride (if you keep reading, but I’ll know if you don’t, and it’s cool).

I mentioned in a post earlier this summer that I’m a person who works hard to maintain friendships and, because I don’t like losing friends, I have a few friends that I’ve known since I started pre-school when I was three years old. One of those friends is Kim. It occurs to me tonight that we’ve known each other for about 24 years now, which seems insane to me, but I can’t really remember life without Kim. I don’t remember meeting her. I’ve just always known her. We aren’t as close as we used to be back in our school days, but we still keep up with each other and our moms are really good friends, too, so that helps. As I was working on editing my novel the other night, I was reading over some description and realized that the friendship that I’d described between my main character and her best friend was loosely based on Kim’s and my friendship in junior high. So when I found out tonight that she got engaged, I was really excited for her. For about a half hour we traded texts that included a lot of exclamation points (something that is very uncharacteristic of me), a picture of the ring, lots of questions, lots of answers, and lots of capital letters. While I was and am very genuinely excited for her, it didn’t take me very long to realize that part of my happiness was as a result of simply connecting with someone. I feel like that doesn’t happen much for me as often, especially because I’m away from everyone I would consider my closest friends.

A lot of people would say that I’m an open book. I freely yammer on to close friends about the mundane details of my life, and I never miss the fact that most other people aren’t quite so giving with details. I’ve been told on numerous occasions that my facial expressions give me away, but I still maintain that I just naturally look pissed off. I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve said “that’s just the way my face looks.” But the thing is that I tell people what I want them to know. Truthfully, I feel a little scared when I come across someone who sees right through me, calls me out,  and has me figured out, sometimes even better than I have myself figured out, because, well, not many people get that far. It’s both scary and comforting when it happens, and it doesn’t happen often. Continue reading →