messy, reckless, beautiful

Her emotions changed so much, I wanted to write a novel about it. About her. It would be didactic, I thought. A eulogy, from me, about freedom and about how to live her life without being so burdened by other people’s thoughts and opinions. Sometimes I wanted to shake her by her shoulders for being so cyclical. But somehow she had peace in all of it, or so she said, but I wanted something more for her. Real assurance. But I couldn’t live her battle and even less could I understand. Maybe even what seemed to me to be a battle was just an everyday morning stuck in her head. There was no way to know.

Now, later, I feel bad for laughing at her small struggles; the way she tried to hide her insecurities and how she had an identity crisis each time she switched from glasses to contacts. She can change like a chameleon whenever she wants to, and she felt so keenly about these inconsistencies. Sometimes I hear her laugh and then she says she got it from me. The laugh. And I know she thinks about these things, a lot. I know she found inconsistencies in me too. I think she probably paid more attention to my personality than I did. Usually I'm thinking about how I look and what I’m eating and what I’m doing, but she’s always wondering about what's ticker taping inside my head. Even when I’m not. And sometimes that bothered me, because there was nothing back there. Or if there was, I didn’t know about it.

No matter how much she tried to understand me, and succeeded, I found something simple to ring true of her, time after time: she cared. And in too many circumstances to count, it’s got her in a lot of trouble. She’s messy with her emotions, and, once given something that resembles a green light, she pours out a whole box full of colored pencils on whatever it is she’s doing. She colors outside the lines and she uses greens and purples for skin tones, but she never stops assessing the art she’s creating. She lets other people use her colors and fill in the shapes and write their name all over her paper—not because she is good at sharing but because she cares so much about them. She loved someone who was reckless with her heart and her body just because he wanted to. She sat in a car for hours with a emotionally lost and confused man and talked with him, even though it tore her own conscience apart. She let a heartbroken boy lay in her lap because he needed love. She let a friend suffocate her hands because that broken girl so desperately needed sanity. She loved a boy in his unraveling because he needed her.

And that’s what made me want to shake her. But, in part, it wasn’t shakeable behavior. From my point of view, I didn’t understand why she didn’t just walk away and give herself a space to breathe and think. I wondered why she let her life so come and go with how other people were feeling and why she anchored herself to our emotions at the expense of her own. I don’t think I'll ever fully understand why she did and does this. But I can grasp her coloring book, full of our crayons, and see the love and pain on the pages. It isn’t right of me to chide something I can’t understand. Maybe the only thing for me to do now is fully appreciate the messy love that she loves with.

It seems to me that the both of us, and specifically me, are always talking about how much love I have. I’m the one doing all the things, taking people to coffee, making videos, writing poems and songs. But then, I’m the one that’s not loving my body like I should and not listening well and not making time to sit with people and care for them. It seems to me that I’ve been overlooking the amount of love that she has for others. Her life isn’t neat and tidy like mine, but if I’ve ever met someone that was overflowing it was her. I used to think we were so similar. Now I know better, but I also know that she has so many things that I admire. Like the strength to fight battles that are unseen. And the acceptance of every person's opinion, especially those that I would brush off as unbelievable— just because I didn’t believe them. The overflow of her love asks how everyone is and what she can do about it. The overflow of mine fountains out over everyone and asks no questions. They--we--are different.

When I think back on the whole of it, the whole of the past three years we’ve known each other, I can’t help but be proud because I see someone that’s changed so much for the better. This is what a best friend is: it isn’t just being close with someone and whispering your secrets to them and hugging them everyday. It’s about growing to appreciate them over time. Letting them wear your embroidered jeans even when it means you get annoyed because they look better on her. Sometimes it’s about accepting competition. Accepting the feelings that come with excelling in something that someone else desperately wants to be good at. And then taking the risk and sharing it with her anyway. It’s about calling each other out and talking each other to sleep.

We used to need each other, and we don’t any more—not in the same way. We no longer need the affirmation or the being chosen or the caring for someone special. It’s different now. I know because even 8 hours away she's the one that I send my blog to first. She’s the one that will always read my words and watch my videos and listen to my songs, no matter how long, because she loves me. How we need each other now is how we all need good friends. We need them in our lives. Messy, reckless, beautiful friends. She will always be one of those.