Starving the flames

First off, I'm all for being straight with people. I don't like it when people "beat around the bush" with something they need to talk about and I don't think they'd like it if I was that way with them, either. All the same, I've wanted to tell a certain friend a certain something that has been on my mind lately. A LOT, actually. Thing of it is, though, I KNOW that if I express how I feel about something that's been going down for too long, I KNOW it will make him upset.

It's not like what I got to say is a matter of life or death. It's not like it's time-sensitive, either. It's one of those occasions where you TRY to be nice about something, but you're really NOT happy about this type of thing continuing, or you just... want to "smack some common sense" into somebody. That's the kind of situation it is.

And I can't bring myself to talk about it.

So, instead, I wrote him a letter. A very BLUNT letter, I might add. I knew this wasn't gonna be a letter I would mail/email to him, so I just spoke my mind in it.

And it felt good to just get it ALL OUT of my system.

One thing I was going to do after I wrote it was crumble it up and throw it away. But that paranoid side of me thought, 'Well, what if someone finds it, checks out the site I mention on it, finds this person and tells him ALL about this ANONYMOUS letter addressed to him?' Yikes.

OK so, throwing it in the trash was out. I COULD have burned it (as an online friend suggested) but.... well, that just didn't seem to be the right thing to do! I realized I wanted to keep this letter. JUST IN CASE I decided to send it in the future. (Chances are, this type of thing will continue, so there's a very GOOD chance I'll want to share those thoughts with him all over again.)

So I had it made into a paper airplane. Hah! But WHY a paper airplane? Because I KNOW what's in it. And the act of "throwing" those words into the air are the next best thing to "throwing" them his way.

Yes. It's symbolic. :P

But all the same, I keep thinking, 'WHY can't I just say these things? Is this the kinda friendship I want, where I'm too afraid to speak my mind?' Not...really. No, it's not. But this particular friend and I have just been going back and forth over MANY things in the past. Yeah, we would bicker. Then two days later, all the world was good again. (I used to have a friend like that in real life. One of my sisters thought it was hilarious how we'd be going at each other's throats one day then laughing our heads off over a joke the next.)

So the question becomes: Will I EVER get these thoughts across to my friend? I don't know. Part of me thinks he FEEDS off of this kinda stuff. You know, getting a rise out of people. (There ARE people like that.) And just saying what I need to say will only add to it. I'm not going to keep tossing that airplane through the air as therapy, though. Life is too dang short to carry around this kind of stuff! You know how they say keeping stuff in only sets you up for an "explosion" later on? That scenario could very well happen here, IF I don't say anything about this kind of issue. So the better thing to do would be to rewrite that letter and NICELY get my thoughts across. Just, state my position on the whole thing.

That's what I should do. And I WILL do it, eventually.