friendship

Last weekend, I went on a little shopping trip. These don’t happen often because we mostly have groceries and things delivered to us these days, but for some reason, you still can’t have alcohol delivered to your door in the state of Indiana, and I wanted to pick up some for our Memorial Day cookout. While at the store, I picked up a book of 1,000 writing prompts from Piccadilly Inc. Mostly because I was planning on doing more writing here, but also because I love books like these since I also find that writing prompts can serve as conversation starters!

Since these are prompts, I want to encourage anyone who’s reading to respond to the prompts as well. You can do so here in the comments section or on your own page if you have one. Either way, I’d love to read everyone’s responses! (And if you’re interested in doing this regularly, bookmark the Prompts category to easily find more of these posts in the future!)

So the first prompt in this book is…

“Write something you really want to say to someone but don’t have the courage to.”

The reason I haven’t written my response to this prompt before now is that I have been thinking about it for a long time. For some reason, I feel like most people’s responses would be to tell someone that they love them or that they’re sorry. I think those are two of the hardest things in the world to say to someone. And right now, I can’t exactly say that there’s anyone that I’m feeling overly apologetic towards, nor am I harboring any kind of unrequited love anywhere.

If anything, I think the thing I’ve been longing for the most is friendship. A lot of my closest friends are busy now that we’re in our mid-to-late thirties or older being married, being parents, or just plain being busy. Which I understand isn’t entirely their fault — I work later than the traditional 9-to-5 hours myself, so when most people are doing things, I’m sadly still on the clock. The pandemic also threw a major wrench in planning things with people in person for a while, given the varying levels of safety places were enforcing or that people were keeping themselves.

But virtual get-togethers aren’t completely ridiculous, are they? I’m more than happy to hop on Zoom or Discord and kick it with people in my free time. In some cases, I’ve actually joined in dinners and chit-chat with friends on a video call, but my anxiety and depression a lot of times prevent me from initiating calls or messages myself. I just want the kind of friends that I can talk to whenever about whatever. I don’t necessarily need friends because I want to trauma dump all over them, but rather, I’d like to have friends whose DMs I can slide into in order to share a funny meme or share a salty joke with at all hours. I might even be in search of a best friend. Why are they so hard to come by? I swear I don’t bite!

So I guess the thing I would say to someone but don’t have the courage to is to go up to some of the people I’m only sort of acquainted with from work, school, or my online gaming and streaming and say: BE MY FRIEND!!!

Now, what about you? Sound off, folks!