We Are Not Like Them

by Christine Pride

Sometimes you just need to be around someone who loved you before you were a fully formed person.

It’s like finding your favorite sweatshirt in the back of the closet, the one you forgot why you stopped wearing and once you find it again you sleep in it every night.

Sitting there together on the warm concrete, it was one of those rare times when, for a brief, glorious moment, the pieces in your life fall into place. I was home.

All we wanted was for our lives to hurry up and happen already. And now here we are. It was supposed to be the happily-ever-after part; what we didn’t understand is that adulthood would be a relentless series of beginnings—new cities, new jobs, new relationships, new babies, new worries. Which is probably why I can’t escape the feeling of always being on the cusp of the next thing.

For a blissful moment, I don’t feel stressed or self-conscious; I feel rejoiced. One of those rare moments when I understand what people mean when they say they’re filled with the Spirit.

I rest my head on his shoulder; he leans his own down to rest atop mine. We fit together like puzzle pieces.

Now I’m wondering why we always wait to say things at all. It’s mighty foolish of us to wait for anything. To wait to tell someone we love them or that we’re mad as hell at them.

She always said, I’m here to be your parent, not your girlfriend.

I told him you needed Jesus, but heaven help me, you put up a wall with even Jesus. Always all up in your head trying to reason everything to death. Sometimes you can’t think your way out of a thing. You have to feel it. And sometimes you just have to let it out. You can’t just push it away and pretend it’s not happening.

It comes down to character, an ability to be defiant in your joy no matter what they do.

“And especially with that long straight hair of yours, girls gonna hate you just for that,” she told me in middle school, and then said that I shouldn’t ever look in a mirror in front of other girls because they’ll think I’m conceited, that I am admiring myself.

“Just keep going on. You can’t expect everyone to get everything. Sometimes you’ve gotta meet people where they are and bring them along.

Because I also stumbled into the miraculous discovery of being loved without having to put so much effort into striving to feel worthy of it.

Maybe it’s what we all want from the people we love: to be seen for exactly who we are. It was a simple realization, so why did it feel like such a miracle?

Because I want you to be able to talk to me about anything… about everything. That’s the only way any relationship works.

When you know better, you do better. Gigi had a pillow on her lounger with that saying.

I’d talked myself out of loving him because I had an expectation of what my life should look like, who I should be with had clouded my vision of who I wanted to be with. There are no easy choices, no safe choices, you can’t plan your way to happiness.