Regressing

"Be generous with kindly words, especially about those who are absent.” - Goethe
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I'm sorry that we have to put our friendship on hold for the next few years.

We had it coming, didn't we? Normal people cannot maintain casual relationships outside their immediate family in child-rearing years; where reproduction and social-regards are at the peak of their demands.

Obligation obliterates all other purposes, and your family and I can never compete with your esteem, no matter how highly I (used to) reside in it.

Would it be an issue if I spent so much time with a you? Would it be an issue if we never touched in the dark or solicited flirtatious remarks? Would it be an issue if we decided to vacate everyday of our lives to write and philosophize?

Even if we did, someone would eventually assume that something is terribly wrong with us, until the prophesy actualizes itself in defeat.

Grudgingly, our friendship and brilliant ideas and intricate philosophies will have to wait until your husbands and wives are dead and ungrateful children are gone.

I'll wait until you're overweight and bald and your silly longing for immortality is subdued and you want nothing more of the world but to let it rest and over.

We'll wait until we are so old that we're children again; sleeping in small beds, inside our shriveled bodies and nostalgic thoughts and smelling funny like the molds in our chest of unrealized dreams.

Maybe that's when we can be friends again. Just to accompany each other, cross-checking our journeys, on that small bed that is getting smaller that it only fits the length and width of ever exerted minds.

We'll dress for that day in an attire that no one will judge us for. Cotton, biodegradable, and as white as hair. We'll meet in a place where dreams and awareness merge at closure.

And maybe then, we can laugh again at sentences that start with "Remember when…?", over cups of coffee, laces of smoke and clandestine calories.

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Image: Jo Whaley