My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return. ~ Maya Angelou

I need to have fun. Laugh. You know, that really deep belly laugh where you swear you’ll pee yourself? When your face is contorted and tears stream but you don’t give a rat’s ass what anyone thinks?

It’s that place, right there that I want to be. The sun comes through and the clouds part my stormy sea.

In that vulnerable place, my pores feel wide open. It’s a personal form of centrifugal force where I dance and spin dizzily and collapse onto the warm sand. It’s the salty waves that my body hugs to the shore. It’s where the trees meet the sky and I hug the solidness and feel grounded.

I need a vacation from my mind and emotions which are like a relentless gerbil’s exercise wheel chit-chatting away. I want to go somewhere and not in a senseless circle. And it’s more than just a place: I need a vacation from my existentialism and to enjoy living a little more.

I don’t care…but I do. I care too much if one could qualify such abstractness.

I am exhausting me. 

I love to love and I hate to hate. It’s a bittersweet tango.

Friends come and go while others surface from lifetimes ago. The threads that bring us together are stronger than we can imagine. The sharp nails of life inflict pain and we need friends to stash a little love and light into our heart bubble.

We all need friends to balance out the people who suck-us-dry.

We can get caught in the undercurrent of what appears to be a friendship when in actuality it is their fear preventing us from growing. It’s neither right nor wrong, we do outgrow some people. We need to shed them gradually or rapidly as we set new boundaries and explore the fences that once worked but now need to be restructured for the invisible expansions of our ever evolving growth.

We value the real ones where there’s a give and take like a river’s flow. We are sincerely happy for each other when there is a breakthrough or leap from the ledge into the unknown. Real friends will give the extra push of encouragement (and sometimes a shove) when the voices of self-doubt shout “it can’t be done!” It can be done. You can do it. Real friends will our kick ass when needed and truly know when to back off.

It shows we care.

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

For me, friendship is a space where I can be the braless wonder of utter no refinement. Or an exquisite, rapturous du jour where my hair does a dervish dance and my toes touch the earth in bareness. It’s a place where if I took a sledgehammer and smashed an inanimate object, it would be okay. It’s the same place that if I sobbed until my intestines and heart bled, it would be okay too.

Real friends respect the need for solitude as well as a good time. My quiet times are personal and necessary. I disengage to be more engaged. My good times are enjoying the star-filled sky of the now and feeling the surge of a great awakening.

Isn’t it wonderful to engage with such friends? Isn’t it surreal to dip into that vulnerable place where mirrors are shattered and all we see is real?

How blissful is that?

How incredibly freeing, invigorating, embracing, inspiring, and expansive is that?

It’s fucking mind-blowing, that’s how real it is! 

I let out a deep sigh of gratitude.

The friends I let in and the friends that let me in…

I cherish.

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Ed: Kate Bartolotta