Withholding

The person I've been closest to for the best part of my life happens to be my cousin. We've gone through varying degrees of closeness since we we up and right now we seem to be inching our way back towards something like it was when we were still at uni and in constant contact with each other. It's a funny relationship in many ways, though. The politics of the family mean that there are some things we just don't talk about. Largely our own fault, of course. The best way to deflect quests about your own life is to volunteer information about the life of someone else, and who else's life did we know so intimately growing up? The number of times the family grape vine worked against the pair of us and our tattling ways is beyond counting. The upshot is that while we are close and consider each other almost as sisters, there are enormous gaping holes in our knowledge of each other now. I've been trying to bridge this lately, feeling the need of a confidant who knows the whole back story, who I can use short hand to fill in. Someone that I know will be a sympathetic ear for all that we are hugely different people. But I'm stuck with the knowledge that there's a good chance anything I tell her will go to her mother, our grandmother, and then my mother, by which stage it will have been garbled and blown out of all proportn. But I need to talk to someone, some girl friend, and right now L is caught up in her own world of longing so she's off the list, and I don't have that many others who can offer the same support. The penalty for letting go of all of my university friends almost as soon as I left uni, I guess, having already jettisoned all bar one of my school friends. But I want to talk to someone about my life, and where it is headed. About hopes, dreams, longings, and unfulfilled planning. I want to vent the frustrations of being stubbornly single, to have a shoulder to lean on, someone who has seen me emotional, and someone who brings a different perspective to the table. As a married mother, Cuz certainly does that. We are very different, the pair of us, but there is a strong bond there all the same. We seem to have switched roles over the years. Where once I was the loud, confident one, she now plays that part while I'm the quieter of the two. We can stil make each other cry with laughter, though, can raise a giggle with just a look, and have a long list of short hand jokes, triggered by anything from a nod, to a phrase, to a raised eyebrow. I admit I let the friendship drift when she got married and had a baby. I was insanely jealous of her for having the things that I always wanted, always felt entitled to. Ad I want to talk to her now at I'm starting to consider the idea that I might have neither in my future. It's a selfish need, I know, but I also know that she needs adult company, stuck at home all day with a baby not yet one and a husband who works all hours and comes home exhausted. Right now, we need each other as much as ever. If only we knew that we could trust the silence of the other...