Mama always said to treat others the way you’d like to be treated.
Treat your friends like family.
Give them love. Make them feel special.
Keep them close to your heart.
And grow your minds together. Challenge each other, but never wavier respect.
If the bad conquers the good, maybe the deed is done.
Maybe the journey diverges and you face a happy or a sorrowful goodbye.
An ending doesn’t deny the fruits of our shared odyssey.
In the pygmy forest, we roam.
Jumping and crouching,
Giggling and gazing.
I look at you. I see your gentle smile that softy lifts your cheeks; it lifts your eyes.
You’re beautiful and you’re interesting.
You’re combative with a bite.
Your carelessness weighs heavy, your carelessness weighs light.
You never failed at making me want more.
You walked into Gashead Tavern.
The Indian summer sun behind you.
It’s early September.
A hand in your pocket.
I felt your ego, but it didn’t scare me.
I wanted to get to know you.
For a moment in our friendship, I thought I really knew you.
You’re more than a firecracker dime from Los Angeles.
Late night tales resting in Dreamland, we used to read poetry to each other.
Poems we wrote.
Talked about books we read.
We shared our anger and disgust about gun violence, sexism, our dying earth.
I passed the joint.
I had boyfriends and girlfriends.
You didn’t play games.
You preached eulogies of dependence.
You were too strong. Too strong to be vulnerable.
I saw black lace drape over your face.
It began to divide us.
You had your problems and I had mine.
We couldn’t speak of them to each other. You wouldn’t understand me.
And you felt, I wouldn’t understand you.
In our most authentic silhouettes,
We bound ourselves, hand in hand.
That feeling, that feeling when it felt good,
that’s friendship.
What Mama said, treat friends like family - it’s always going to be different though.
Friendship is a choice. You choose your friends, you choose to let them become family.
There was a moment in time, I remember feeling like sisters.
We were always mistaken for sisters.
You suggested we take a drive across the Golden Gate.
Get a glimpse of her international orange.
We parked in front of Mike’s Camera.
You found your medium format.
I noticed a camera on the metal shelf.
I walked away from it twice.
I lifted lenses and spun them, wiped dust away from aged cases, rubbed my fingers between a green camera strap.
I pondered to myself, should I revisit an old passion? Relight a flame.
That’s as far as I thought.
Before leaving with my FE, the clerk comments, are you two twins?
We giggled unsure if we should tease or be truthful.
We walked outside and noticed a white slip latched to Desirée’s windshield whipper.
Too high to remember to pay the meter.
Oh well.
You once told me with a rare teary eye, I showed you what it means to be a true friend.
I want to rewrite that memory: we showed each other what it means to be a true friend.
We all have the good.
We all have the bad.
We all have the ugly.
Sometimes goodbyes are the end and forgiveness is hard.
Sometimes time changes things.
The rotation of the earth,
The changing of the seasons,
I’m unsure of where to go from here so I’m embracing uncertainty.
Maybe I have a wishful prophecy or maybe it’s coincidence, but I thought of a new name for your Laundromat series:
The end of a cycle.