Tuesday, March 25, 2014

An open letter to anyone who is my friend.

I want to be perfectly straight with you. I think it's important that you know what you're getting into if you're getting into a friendship with me. There are some things that I absolutely will not do as your friend. 

I will not sleep with your crush. I will not have sexual relations with, make out in a dark ally with, and even if in ten years, you are happily married and have children, I am going to have serious doubts about even developing any sort of feelings for this person that you used to have a crush on ten years ago. I may kiss them close-lipped in front of you at a New Year's Eve party, along with a hundred other people, and I might hug them if we are friendly, but I promise, unless there is a naked picture of me floating around somewhere that I don't know about, they will not see me naked. 

I will not let you walk around with a period stain on your pants/food in your teeth/booger in your nose/guacamole smeared on your forehead. I will tell you. How discretely I do this will be in relation to how much I have had to drink. 

I will not let you date a douche bag without telling you that I think he/she is a douche bag. I am sure you are already aware of this. I am sure you don't want to hear this. I also know that sometimes we avoid certain things because we don't want to hear them. If I have to listen to your boyfriend call you fat, he is a douche. If your boyfriend accuses you of cheating with your gay best friend and your straight female friend, continuously, he is a douche. If he borrows money from you, from your family, from his friends, your friends, the bank, doesn't have a job, and doesn't pay anyone back, he is a douche. You get the picture. 

I will not ever tell you to build a bridge and get over it. This is your life. I am here. I will ALWAYS be here. No matter how many douche bags you fall in love with or how many times you fall back in love with the same one. I will point out the inherent flaws each time, I will listen to the repeating stories, I will offer my advise, always. I will never expect you to be someone you are not and let go of something or someone before you are ready. (Note: unless you are being physically abused in which case I will call the police on that mother-effer.)

I will never realign my priorities so much that I will not have a place in my life for you. I am always a phone call or text message away. At most.  One of the most devastating moments in my life came in the form of a text from a friend who I thought would be there forever. "I do not know where our friendship stands. My priorities have shifted greatly..." And that was pretty much it. I will never leave you hanging. If you are my friend, you will always know where you stand, where we are at, and that you are one of my priorities, even if we go a period of time without talking. 

I will never intentionally leave you out. I never enjoyed the cliques in high school, I don't particularly like them outside of high school. I don't enjoy the drama that seems to follow some people around, and I most certainly don't enjoy making other people feel like less than.