Surviving the Fire

Posted by Tabitha 

True Friends.

These are the people you count on to pick you up and celebrate when you announce enthusiastically that you’ve been promoted, paid off your car, are engaged, etc. We also count on them to pick us up, literally from the ground, when we’ve managed to successfully dig a hole in our lives and burrow in it. That’s a whole other kind of success, unfortunately.

If you are blessed, then you have a handful of these friends and you treasure them more than you treasure (insert your ungodly possession here).

So what happens when you see a true friend running into a building engulfed in flames, with no fire protection and the simple “hope” that something good will come out of it?

Well, I have a true friend who has done just that.

My first inclination was to yell “Stop, you fool! You’re smarter than this! Why are you doing this?” However; in all my so-called brilliance (I’m using this term loosely), I once ran into that same exact building engulfed with flames and realize that nobody, not even a 10- ton gorilla or my best friend Romina, who can be much scarier than a 10-ton gorilla when trying to protect a friend, could have stopped me. I have the figurative burn marks as a reminder; yet, I felt like I’d be a hypocrite if I stopped my true friend. Instead, I let her run and didn’t even call her a fool.

I didn’t even give her a fire retardant jacket to survive the burns...

So now what? She’s in the fire and is suffering 10 degree burns at every turn. As a friend, I can only watch miserably offering my words of encouragement- when asked. Why don’t I push? Why don’t I offer the “tough love” that nurturing women so cleverly offer at times? Well, experience I guess. Friends around me know how quickly I was to pull away when anything more than distant encouragement was offered. It came to the point where I decided to suffer my burns quietly in solace.

Yesterday my true friend said, “Why did this happen? How did I get here?” I realized something. While I wanted to scream and yell, “RUN FOR YOUR LIFE….don’t question it!” There was nothing I could say that would make sense to her. The fire is too intense for her. I mean, do firefighters stop to investigate the cause of the fire while the fire is blaring around them? Of course not. It is not until the smoldering building is a heap of nothing and any surviving evidence is pulled from the wreckage that the investigation begins. 

Instead I said, “That’s the thing, honey. While you are in it, you’ll never know. You’re too close.”

It breaks my heart to pieces, but yesterday for this true friend, it’s what I had to offer. The truth. The truth is, you just need to get out alive. When she does get out alive, because she will, I will be there with the fire First Aid kit, just as my person (my best friend Romina) was there for me. There are no questions asked. No I told told you’s. Just love. Just love…

True Friends. What every gal needs to survive the proverbial fire.

Sweetfully yours,

Tabitha