By Cynthia Aralu

It is a weird situation. Where to start? 

I guess I never thought I’d ever be in this situation. I mostly keep to myself. I’d have to be comfortable to go to where you are, for me to ever do so. And if I’m told, “You’re always welcome to come.” That to me is an invitation. And if I start to speak to you and start to think, you just might be okay, I would consider if we could be friends. If I give my phone to you and say to you, “put in your number”, and you dial your phone from mine, right in front of me, without a prompt from me, and afterwards I ask, “so that means we’re friends, right?” and you agree, I would think we are friends. I would show you grace as a friend, if ever you fall short. I have too much self control to ever be deliberately sexual in speech, so, if I speak about wanting to see your garden, best believe I mean that as a friend wanting to spend time with another friend, and if I speak about a serious topic like cervical screening, there really is no sexual overtone, just an intellectual conversation I am trying to have. I would not take banter seriously. I would create space for you in my mind and in my heart. I’m kind of simple and straight forward like that.

I have been honest from the start, so, it is silly, I think, that I have been made to feel that I had imagined us being friends. Even the manner of revelation had been foul. I am glad I had the sense to find out and he’d been uninhibited when he’d spoken. But, I don’t take disrespect lightly and I never stay where I’m not welcome. I also don’t waste energy on people who are not family or friends. 

It made me sick to think that I was talked about by people I considered friends. And it did hurt. A silent battle waged in my mind as I tried to decide on whether to allow myself to feel my emotion or whether to stop myself from wasting my emotion on someone who does not hold importance in my life anymore. You see, I have come a long way to finally feel a myriad of emotions as they occur, unlike in the past when I felt too detached from an experience to know how I actually felt, such that I was fascinated and worried as a child that I had never felt the emotion of missing someone, but my sister was clearly able to.

I don’t know what it was and I cannot exactly wrap my head around it, but I read a tweet as I scrolled through twitter, which brought me to the conclusion that all of this, the event, the emotion and the individual, did not really matter and I stopped hurting.

I hope to forget this happened once again, as with all of life’s character building experiences, and to stay soft, to stay kind and to always prosper. 

Thank you for reading/listening to today’s post. Remember to like this post and share it with your friends if you enjoyed it. Follow me on my blog, katmira’s blog or my podcast, Amara’s Musings, to receive notifications whenever I have a new post. You can also subscribe below to get an email notification whenever a new blog post is out. This is particularly helpful if you don’t have a WordPress account.

Let it be, until we meet again or “Ka ọ dị” as it is said in Igbo.