The Friend Who Stops Me Mid-Pour

meet s.

a little shorter than me. a warm laugh that arrives before she does. an annoying smile. you’d like her, most people do, once they get past the part where she does not take anyone’s nonsense.

including mine. i am, frankly, a little scared of her. the good kind of scared. mostly respect, with a little self-preservation mixed in.

she designs products for a living, user experience, human behaviour. which means her reality checks arrive professionally calibrated. she watches people for a job, and then she watches me, and the observations land with an accuracy that should be illegal.

she’s not a fairy. she’s real. she procrastinates. she’ll stay home for days. she doesn’t take me seriously, which is honestly fun. and she is more emotionally intelligent than anyone i’ve met, with boundaries so clear you could draw them on a map.

here’s why she gets a whole series.

there’s a thing i do in every close relationship. i fall in, and then i vanish. i take on the other person’s problems, their moods, their taste in music, their emotional weather. mine goes quiet. i pour and pour and pour, until one day i realise i can’t remember what i liked before this person existed.

s is the first person who stops me mid-pour. hey, what about you, though?

someone who cares about me without letting me disappear into them. who reminds me that i exist as a whole person outside everyone else’s world.

it stings sometimes. my instinct is to spend myself on people, all of it, and call that love. she hands the cup back. i’m unlearning a pattern i’ve had for as long as i can remember, and she’s the reason i can even see it as a pattern.

it’s the kindest thing anyone has done for me, and it doesn’t look kind at all in the moment.

we are very different people. i’m the performative one, she’s the realist. i can’t hold silence, i’ll narrate my life to a bus driver, call out a bully mid-sentence, tell a manager he’s crossing a line, loudly. she’s intentional about every word that leaves her.

if i were in her place, i’d have judged and given up on me 99999 times. she’s been patient instead. somehow we never run out of things to talk about.

we’ve talked enough to fill a book. so this is the book, or at least the margins of it. a series of anecdotes from conversations with s: the things she says, and what they teach me about being a person.

part 1 starts with a sink full of dishes. it’ll make sense.