A few weeks ago, I was con­tacted out-of-the-blue by some­one with whom I had once been very close, but as is such with peo­ple you know in high school, these things tend to happen.

But this.…probably shouldn't have hap­pened the way it did.

We had been friends since.…God, it seems as if I've writ­ten too many entries such as this one in recent weeks. One would won­der if nos­tal­gia and the past seems to fol­low me around…I often won­der this myself, but I hope that I try to look at each sit­u­a­tion as some­thing to handle…differently. What I do know, how­ever, is that my tract record with these things, at least the ones in recent mem­ory, is not a good one. I'm not sug­gest­ing that that type of out­come would hap­pen here, but I just don't know some­times… Any­who, we had always leaned on each other for this or that while main­tain­ing a very sar­cas­tic, some­times (unwit­tingly) hurt­ful relationship.

That all changed junior year of high school, though. What exactly changed between us, I'm still not sure of. What I do know is that we started meet­ing at lunch and kissing.…which sud­denly became "allowed" in our relationship.…and then we would leave to our respec­tive classes, as if noth­ing had hap­pened. No titles, no responsibility…and I don't really think that either of us were really inter­ested in either of those; even if they were available.…they just didn't seem to apply to us. Or per­haps we never looked at the options, I dunno.

Those "addi­tions" to our rela­tion­ship dis­solved just as quickly as they had appeared, only it was I who made a con­scious deci­sion to stop the way things were hap­pen­ing. I had become uncom­fort­able with the way things were pro­gress­ing, not because of her, but because I was scared of devel­op­ing feel­ings beyond what the sit­u­a­tion had become, which I believed to be free of them. Why I was scared, I don't really know. But since then, our friend­ship was never the same.

* * *

We've met a cou­ple of times since the ini­tial e-mail, and many things have hap­pened that I…just didn't expect. And now I'm not sure what to do about it…I'm being pulled in two dia­met­ri­cally opposed posi­tions, and try­ing to find a middle-ground is…at least with me.…harder than it should be.…with any­thing, really.

A lot of unre­solved things have been cleared up between us, and the expe­ri­ence of lay­ing things to rest was cer­tainly cathardic, if only for a small amount of time. More things have risen in the recent time we've spent together that I ever expected, and now I'm at a total loss…

I don't know what's going on.…I want to be trust­ing, and hopefully.…eventually.…loving, to some­one. I just don't know if that part of my heart even exists any­more. And if it does, I guess I'm scared to turn it on. Scars last forever.…emotional ones are no different.