it’s so so so so so scary to be known, to have relationships, people you are scared of losing……….after breaking up with the girl i was in love with at 16 i coped by making sure i never became too close to any of my friends, constantly reminding myself not to become too comfortable, to never become close enough with anybody that you’d be devastated by losing them.
i lost that somewhere along the way, though. first year of uni, i think, when i met my current best friends. when i met those two i knew everything about them very quickly and they begged me for stories about myself, tell us your life, oli, tell us one true thing……… we would sit around in graveyards 5 min walk from our college and try to smoke weed without getting paranoid. trade childhood stories but i always got too self conscious. i couldn’t fit mine into a narrative the way they could. but now a year and a half later they know every inch of me. as always it switches and i become the car crash, the trainwreck, the dependent, needy, emotional one. the second i get really close to somebody it’s all over, they have to cope with all of me.
anyway, we sat outside the water refill station at poland rock and he looked me in the eyes and told me, you are not a car crash, not an addict waiting to happen, none of this trainspotting bullshit, a functional life doesn’t have to involve a 9-5, an early bedtime. you have a future, you have to think of that future, not crazy, just the next day, just see it. i wanted to cry. how vicariously, violently awful to be seen like that, to have someone know your mind. it’s like being flayed alive if it was somehow reassuring. sitting with them both i felt loved while she told me i had to get better so we could stay close and that we all had our flaws, like nobody had ever taught her how to be kind and so semi-frequently she could be mean.
to have relationships this intense i think i am addicted to it which is hard and bad, not everything can be a coming of age movie, sometimes people just want to chill. not every conversation has to be one for the diary entries. still. i am so grateful, to have people who care about me. it is so scary. sitting and listening to them i felt the urge to constantly apologise but they told me i had to stop. and so i started thanking them instead. and then i thought about when i was fourteen, and i realised that saying thank you was the same as saying i’m sorry. i wrote about it in my notes app. a little poem. not i’m sorry for making you put up with me, but thank you for doing so, thank you for loving me.
and it’s odd, how you can constantly relearn something you thought you knew years ago…… i am twenty. it has been five years since 2021, when i learnt how to be alone and how to love myself. but those lessons were only truly put into action after that breakup. and i have not fallen in love since then. even if the current love i have is not necessarily sexual or intensely romantic in nature i am still most likely in love. or at least i was. or - and maybe this is it - i am really truly close to people again. for the first time. somebody else is seeing my raw self. i can’t pretend to be calm or self assured or in love with myself. i have to actually be it.
SIGH………… THANKS GUYS 4 READING!