I love having insightful friends. They provide me with gems of knowledge and wisdom that either make me laugh, make me cry, or make me think. And on a night like tonight, when good friendship was in high demand, it made me happy that I could talk to each of my insightful pals and gather their perspectives on things.

One of tonight's insightful, deep thoughts (not verbatim, sorry!) : "I know how hard it would be to completely remove him from your life, because then there would be a huge hole that would be hard to fill. No matter how much we tried, we know that we can't fill that hole completely because of the way you care about him. Although you obviously care about all of your friends, there is something different in the way you care about him versus someone else."

True indeed. I care very much about all of my friends, and I would hope that they would do the same. And of course, I know I care about him in a much different way than I care about my other friends, simply because of the depth of our friendship and the time that we've had to cultivate it through our experiences together. I realize that completely removing his presence from my life would be disastrous, and would cause a lot of damage to my emotional state.

But I'm seeing that I can no longer take everything into my hands, for it gives me too much stress to try and make people want to be my friends and spend time with me. They have to want it, too, and on their own terms. So this is my message to Matt: if you really want me around and in your life, I need to know it and see it. I need proof. I'm not making the effort anymore to keep you around; no, it's your turn. You know that I would be there for you no matter what...but I'm not guaranteed to stick around when I feel I have no place to be as your "best friend." Don't prove me right.