i'm letting you in
hello friends,
truth be told, i find the line between friendship and acquaintance-ship to be quite blurry. perhaps blurry isn't the right word -- mangled is a better one. growing up, i didn't have many friends past elementary school (and it didn't help that i changed schools multiple times. in my high school years i began casually skipping classes because i could get away with it).
there was this one time in elementary school - maybe in fourth or fifth grade -- i had a crush on this boy named tommy. he was lanky, with sharpened brown eyes, a rugged face, and a dirty, blondish-brown buzzcut that was usually styled into little spikes. as a child, i was an attention whore, and i believed that the best way to get his attention was to roll around in the grass where the boys played soccer.
it was mid-afternoon, sometime in fall, when the sun began to slowly dim, preceding the winter. i rolled in the middle of the football field - which, in truth, was really a soccer field - with my friend izzy, our hair messied with blades of yellowing grass and cool-toned brown dirt, completed with hints of gray pebble and mineral.
tommy's friend, jojo, kindly asked us to get out of the grass. a rational suggestion. tommy looked over us as if we were the stupidest people on earth. my heart panged.
more recently, i spoke to one of my friends who echoed the same sentiment: they're scared to let people in, romantically or platonically. they said - and i quote - "i'm too unstable, i don't want to hurt you."
as i've grown older, i think i've realized that perhaps the best thing to do is to let people hurt you - it's how we make connections, memories. it's how we forgive, forget. i'm not advocating for you to seek out people to hurt you. i'm advocating for you to let that new friend in, or let yourself get lost in a new lover.
more importantly: i'm giving myself permission to let people in, i've spent too long shoved in the corner of my room, cozied up in various quilts and blankets my grandma gifted me, typing away on the internet, hoping that maybe, just maybe, someone will see me.
but i can't do that without allowing them inside my world.
with love,
erin
p.s.
i've recently been reading all about love by bell hooks. i admit, i'm not good at keeping at keeping a schedule to read. but i try to read 30 pages at a time, if not more. it has, to say the least, changed my perspective on love, and letting people in, entirely. it is a strong recommendation from me.