*Note: this is a work in progress but it's been three days so time to push publish already*
I learned the word loquacious when I read it in a note from my high school best friend (HSBF) to someone else. She was talking about me. That note, found about a year into our friendship, rocked my world. HSBF was commiserating with another girl about me; how loquacious (she used this word and I had to look it up to figure out how insulted I should be), how needy I was. She said she understood the other girl's frustration with how I monopolized HSBF's time. I felt foolish, here I was turning my soul inside out with this girl, fearful I was taking too much time, needing her too much, talking too much and bam, I was right. I wasn't someone she wanted to spend time with, I was someone she had to spend time with, an obligatory friendship. I moved out of her locker, I wrote her an injured and sarcastic letter, and we were through. She responded to my note within the same note and just for kicks included corrections of my note for grammar and spelling. She was dead to me.
HSBF was a girl everyone loved. She was a force of nature from the moment she arrived at our school, one of the rare people anyone knew about before school even started. I remember hearing about her and wondering what the big deal was but I didn't expect much intersection between us even though she ended up living right next door. She was unique, able to move seamlessly between all the strata of the high school caste. She wore men's blazers with safety pins where buttons once were or big floppy witchy hats. She was studious and athletic; outgoing and pensive. She was substantive and light. She seemed to exist above it all, free from insecurity, able to love people freely, able to be herself. I saw her sometimes as we both left our houses to sprint for the bus but never really talked to her until she approached me one day after school. She told me she was looking at me in typing class that day and thought I was pretty and just wanted to let me know. Well that was just the best darn thing you can tell a 13 year old girl. To have someone go out of their way to tell you that you are pretty, someone you don't even know and who was so well liked, did my head in.
She was instantly someone I needed to know. Needed to be my friend. Needed to be her friend. And so it went. We had the normal girlfriend courtship with note passing, clothes swapping, and locker sharing. Our notes to eachother were tomes, dredging of the soul. Her friendship was a privilege. Knowing she chose me as a friend made me think better of myself. Everything she thought of me was important to me. She was my reference point. If she thought I was a good writer, a good singer, a pretty girl then maybe I could put something out there for everyone to see instead of protecting my fragile esteem at all costs. Everyone loved her, and I got to be her friend. But I wasn't as much a friend to her as I needed her to be a friend to me. Even before I had confirmation of how she felt, I was sensitive to monopolizing her time, to needing her too much. I knew deep down there was a lack of balance but she always assured me away from my worry of bothering her with the unburdening of my soul even though she never really invited me into hers.
I have approached all my friendships since with a certain amount of caution. After my experience with HSBF I'm my most unkind and aloof with people I perceive to be uber-social because it's harder for me to figure out where I am in the strata of their myriad of relationships and I'm always prepared for my position to change. I have no idea what about someone with so many friends makes them want to be mine and I never will. So I don't want to depend on them and be wrong. A part of me is always passively alert for indications that I have overestimated the type of friendship I have. If you are doing something for me and seem put out, it will be the last time you are put out by me because I will never ask you for another thing. If you're doing a million other things on the phone and call me when you only have three minutes to talk, in my universe, that's shorthand for 'I want to manage talking to you (because you talk so damn much) by forcing this conversation to be only 3 minutes. Maybe you'll get better at getting to the point and not building me a watch to tell me the time.' I know I talk a lot. It's who I am but I try to manage it so every interaction with me doesn't take a half hour if you don't have a half hour. I'm not very good at it though and not sure I ever will be.
My lesson in the HSBF incident was to make sure subsequent friends were getting as much from the friendship as I was, in essence, keeping score. If I called them more than they called me, I dialed back because I did not want to bother them. If I felt I was the friend they called only when they had 5 minutes to talk, I made a note of it; they were my 5 minute friends. No one ever has to be anything other than what they are. 5 minute friend doesn't have to set aside extended time because I tell stories like a Tarantino film, she gets the Reader's Digest version of events and everyone gets to move on. Friends are 'as-is' for me, I don't feel comfortable asking them to do things or change things or even noting what things they do that irritate me. As Soul Twin puts it, she wants organic relationships, all that we have is what the other gives willingly.
HSBF and I made up 6 months or so after we washed our hands of one another. I credited her for years with making me a better friend to everyone by making me concious of the balance of the friendship. Perhaps that was just a sour experience with a person when I was younger and more inclined to be grateful for having such a friend everyone wanted to have. Thinking I was the lucky one and I was less than the person who chose me. I recognize only now the destructive message I took from that about what a person has to put up with to be my friend. For all the good it may have brought into subsequent friendships, it has colored my perspective of friendship, perhaps forever. I remain sensitive to managing my friendship footprint and try to gauge how much of me they have room for so I don't overdo it. It's more pragmatic than it is anything else but I also realize as I've been dredging this up to write about it, it's also a way to control relationships and protect myself from their inherent creation of vulnerability. While any relationship creates a certain sense of obligation, I can not handle the thought of being a part of the constellation of people in a friend's life that are simply tolerated.
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