Entry 102: —
Reading my journal from two years ago, I realize how much the dynamics in my friendships and romantic relationships have been altered. And for the past months, I have been creating barricades.
I won’t stop.
It’s so easy to let people into your space when the words “no” and “please, stop” are alien in your parlance. And the thing about boundaries is that in the absence of these words lies the infinite blurring of peripheries until nothing is left.
*
Z texts me one morning on Instagram. Says he likes my aura, says he wants to love reading once again – that he loved reading as a child but wore it out in his late teens. Says he wants to be friends with me.
Out of kindness, I agree, with an impulse to get Z back to reading once more.
Z revers me – sometimes it comes off as patronising, but I pay no mind. We get along. After a while, we do not. The reverence quells. The perfunctory gestures stop. Two years already, Z and I become ‘status viewers.’
This hurts me: the precise calculation of getting into one’s space to disromanticize it, to disrespect it, to tamper it.
*
Over the months, I have experienced recurring treacheries from individuals I let into my space. For someone who avoids wahala, who is predominantly ebullient and jocular, my rebounding reflection was that I did not deserve dishonesty and disloyalty.
People are like vultures: they find ways to get at you, and when they finally do, they gnaw on you into nothingness. It’s always calculated, always rehearsed, because to prey on someone – and preying can manifest itself in many ways – there’s always an exactness, a carefulness.
I have spent the past few months defining and redefining boundaries. Sometimes it tilts towards the extreme because I am never a neutral person. If I dislike something, it shows. If I’m averse to a person, it manifests.
Once, a well-meaning friend called me “bitch”, and the conversation segued from a travesty to a serious fight until it died down. He did not believe I could flare up for it. I have invariably been against cuss words. But in the past few months, I have been stricter; I believe that these words, diminishing one’s self, are keys to disrespect. Disrespect starts subtly until it bloats.
Sometimes, I want to shut everyone off. These days, too often, I’m conflicted about letting people into my space, whether romantically or casually.
But, frankly, as much as I have experienced dismay from some people (in one way or the other), some have also held me, loved me very deeply, fought for me even. And Victor Hugo is right: to love someone is to show the face of God. I have found God’s love in people, in kind and well-meaning friends.
I have decided to keep my heart for relationships open, though toned down. A realisation: love comes with strict boundaries. It must come with strict boundaries. I have an expectation – not of perfection but of basic human decency. There should be joint reverence.
Prentice Hemphill succinctly puts it: “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.”
