I sometimes say things I don't really mean on here. Hyperbole, trash talk, venting, call it what you will. While there may be some grain of truth to what I say, most of it is just BS, lashing out at an angry world.

I said some shit, not too long ago, that might have had some people wondering as to whether my friends intentions were pure in regards to his daughter.

When I said that he had an inappropriate relationship, I didn't necessarily mean that he had any sort of 'sexual' relationship. I was worried that his daughter may have grown too attached to him and would have trouble adapting as an adult, and vice versa.

When you have been abused, and had your trust broken, you start to see things lurking in the shadows, things that aren't there. I have to believe that all those nights I spent comforting my friend as he stayed up with his crying three year old daughter, desperately trying to console her after her mother committed suicide, were in good faith, and that he was not, in fact, doing some horrid thing to her in the other room, somehow remaining perfectly silent, like my paranoid feverish brain would somehow like to suggest.

I saw the pain on my friends face and the tears in his eyes, a single father who had not yet turned thirty, and I could not help but give him, like I would hope we give everyone, the benefit of the doubt, and assume he acted out of kindness and not out of malice, because how could someone live, suspecting every act of kindness and every good deed, thinking behind every decent act is a heart of malice?

No one could, at some point you have to put your trust in love, and hope, and presume their innocence and lack of malice, because how else could one live? At some point, we have to trust, we have to reach out, we have to assume that the people we care about mean us no harm and do right by the people we care about, because we depend on one another, to survive, to prosper, to experience joy and contentedness.