It’s funny when you suddenly realise something that the core of your self is based on, when you just haven’t really noticed it before, despite spending much of your life working around it as an unspoken law or principle.

Sound cryptic? Perhaps this will enlighten. ^_^

This afternoon I told a friend who was worried about an assignment they’d been writing that I would be more than happy to look at it, read the relevant texts, and send back comments and annotations. I made this offer wholeheartedly, never stopping to think that I would have to spend literally hours combing through the original texts and then matching up the work of my friend. And even though I’ve realised it, I still have every intention of doing so. As soon as possible.

Most people, if they ask me for feedback or help on something, I will, circumstances depending, do what I can to help out - read through an essay maybe, listen to a speech, comment on a haircut, help carry something, whatever. But there are things that kind of go ‘beyond the pale’ in this, and the offer I casually and sincerely made this afternoon made me realise this.

Thinking about it, it seems that I have an unconscious ‘list’ if you will. A list of people that, no matter the request, no matter the assistance asked, or what it is, I will do everything i can for. This list doesn’t seem to be one I’d add to consciously - it’s just there.

It’s a bit weird. It feels kind of like the whole ‘bestest buddies’ thing associated with school and the like, but it is more than that. It is very… well, touching, to realise that there are people that I am willing to go to extreme lengths to, who aren’t immediately those with whom I would normally associate such things.

It’s kind of a melding of two songs, one I really like, and one I… used to tolerate, when someone else watched it on TV. The latter is, somewhat obviously, the theme song from the TV show Friends. The other is a love song by Bryan Adams - which I’m sure many of you can guess. ~_^

It is heartwarming to realise how much you care for people that you wouldn’t necessarily think of as such - kind of a subconscious feeling, a love if you will. Surprising really - I never associated myself much with other people, as several of you may know. Yet here I find myself with what is best described as an unconscious feeling of family to people I’d never really consciously thought of as such.

Family isn’t exactly the word I want here, but it conveys the feeling the best I think - a kind of deep, unreserved caring. It’s nice to know that I am in fact more like I wished I was than I had cynically assumed.

rnAlcata’riel.

-Andiyar