A Little BackStory

So, someone who before that drinky Friday night basically didn't exist for you except as "the hot retoucher" extends the hand of friendship. You aren't sure where it comes from, but okay, you say to yourself, I'll play along.

But being your mother's daughter, you're a little suspicious (You maybe are a little too fond of exclaiming "Estoy sospechosa!" when things seem a little too easy). But with your dharma vows to try to remain open to all of your experience, and a generous plop of your father's gregarious nature larded through you -- you are, in fact, a USDA Grade Triple-A Prime, Luger's-quality cote de beouf of Aiko larded with Marty -- you shake that hand of friendship.

Things get warm and personal. Maybe a little too warm and personal (you do tend to have, as Anne Lamott might say, some teeny, tiny boundary issues).

You've been spending a lot of time working out your shit, slowly, often painfully. You have had a strange and terrible and wonderful summer, and as luck would have it, the strangeness and terribleness and wonderfulness seem to have worked a miracle and maybe pried open your heart a bit. As luck would also have it, you happen to have a spot open for a new friend. You believe that maybe this opening of your heart and the opening for a friend are perhaps no coincidence.

So, you reach out, and you take the hand of friendship that is offered to you, because maybe, just maybe, you have been having a really hard time with the politics of the place where you work, and no one has really made any effort to be particularly friendly to you.

You, a gregarious person who thrives on building partnerships and friendly relationships in order to be successful at business, you find that some days at 6:00 you barely make it to the corner of Trinity and Rector before you find yourself weeping with loneliness. You don't tell anyone, even your best friend, how you sit in the park some days across from the Hole In the Ground after work and cry and cry in despair at the idea that you made the most expensive mistake of your life.

You didn't notice till later that it is an office populated by loners, everyone huddled like strays over their bowls ready to snap at anyone who comes too close. In fact, no one ever asks the bland polite questions that co-workers ask each other, like "How was your weekend?" "How are you this morning?" No one asks where you come from or where you worked before. It's as if someone smote the ground with a magic wand and up you sprung, wholly formed and without any warning to anyone else.

You look into your boss's eyes and you see a cipher. He frequently mouths management words like "teamwork" but what you are really seeing is just another scared person who feels desperate to protect his own position. But that's for another entry. We're talking about the hand of friendship here.

And don't forget the person offering the hand of friendship is in the middle of an ocean of shit all his own. But for our purposes, this isn't his story. And since you can't know anyone else's experience, we're just gonna let this one be all about you. But maybe, just maybe, he looked into your eyes and saw that maybe here was another gentle soul to whom he felt safe offering the hand of friendship, because maybe he needed one, too. Maybe (and this is pure speculation and making shit up now!) he had been feeling a little lonely at the place, too. Maybe he looked into your eyes and saw that friendship with you is actually a pretty safe place. Who knows? Like we've said, now we are making shit up.

"Oh, fuck it," you say. Because there's something gentle in his eyes that you like. Here is someone in this workplace who actually seems interested in you, the person. Not you, the co-worker. In fact, you, the person, seem to delight him, so you just decide to go with it.

You are thrilled that you might, just might, be able to stomach the job if you know you have a friend there. Just one friend at the workplace doesn't seem to be too much to ask. In fact, after a few minutes of conversation, you realize that if you had met this person outside of work, you would have chosen him to be your friend.

The rest of your life is nothing but your friends. If someone were to ask you, in your life outside of work "Do you ever get lonely?" you would be honestly puzzled. Loneliness seems an anathema to you. It's pretty hard to feel lonely when you know that you are walking the earth loved.

But wait, you should have been more careful.

Because what you didn't see, as you were reaching out delightedly to take the hand of friendship, was the fist that was forming behind his back. And before you can even blink, you find yourself hard on your ass on the floor, touching the bloody lip in wonder and your tongue throbbing from where you bit it when you sat down so hard.

And what you hear, in your mind is a voice that sounds remarkably like your mother's:

"I told you so."

So, what you do is what you've done your whole, entire life. You wipe the blood from your lip, blink back the tears, roll down the shutters over your eyes and your soul, and make sure you are dusted off. You pick the gravel out of your palms and back away slowly, because you have learned.