I Swear You Will Be Fine

I pride myself as being a highly pragmatic and logical person. In fact, one of the attributes that I’d love to see in a friend is a show of pragmatism (efficacy too, but that’s just running down the list now). You didn’t come across as a highly pragmatic person to me at first, but definitely highly logical. This trait obviously made you bloody excellent at one of our most harrowed subjects – stats. i am still struggling today, even though the girls are doing their best to support me, and especially sha who has been kidnapped and replaced because she tells me now that stats is her favorite subject. But yes, you were a highly logical person, and we would have discussions about what made sense and what would not, often in class over “proper” topics, but also often outside of, during our breaks where the topics went off tangent but the arguments remained highly logical.

Yesterday, I was having a conversation with another highly logical and pragmatic person who I’ve known for a good many years now. He needed to talk to me to sort some of his thoughts out, and he said he is considering therapy but not quite convinced he needed it. To paraphrase, he felt he was introspective enough to see what he needed to sort out could use a third voice (besides his external and internal voices). But he was hesitant, saying he didn’t feel like he was up to it also. Incidentally, this was a conversation we had in our little group chat yesterday, when i asked you guys if i should cancel therapy cos i really didn’t feel up to it. So i mentioned it to this friend, and said, if you’re not doing it because you’re avoiding to address something, but just can’t be present fully right now to do it, then sure, take your time.

Instead of responding to that, he asked me, why am I getting therapy now? Bearing in mind that we’ve prided ourselves as individuals who usually just work through our own problems (blessed enough to do so), and in his eyes, I just wasn’t someone who needed to “talk about my feelings”. Then I said, I started for two reasons: because one day i might be sitting on the other side of the conversation, and secondly, it was to figure out why not having you around anymore hurt more than it logically should. As I was explaining these reasons to him, my voice trembled and tears flowed freely again before I could stop myself. In my logical mind, I was going “oh crap, what the heck, get it together man. this is not you.” Then he asked another question, genuine and without malice, why do I keep talking to your family, about you, and continue to keep you alive through our shared experiences? In his words.. why do i keep returning to a crash site even though I could just walk away?

It was a very logical approach to questioning my why. He said he thought you were just a friend, and barely knew each other for a few years. logically it shouldn’t have been so hard, logically i could’ve moved on, logically it should have been easy to just compartmentalize and relegate you to a memory and a past.

I told him that knowing you, our friendship, our conversations, is not just a memory, but all of these moments and knowledge of who you are, are now just part of me. We are all sum of our experiences – not just interactions, but experiences. we can choose our friends and people we surround ourselves with. those are tangibles we can actively choose to distant ourselves from. But when the experience crystallizes into your “self”, how do you choose to logically sever what’s a part of you now? you can’t, cos it’s illogical to think that you can do so.

“Lynnda”