“ How did you feel?  you asked 5 months before when I had mentioned how I grew farther from an old friend I once had.
I felt red with warmth at how close we were. This feeling of being alive like I don’t remember having felt so strongly.

( What I had failed to notice was how that warmth went from comforting in how you laughed at my jokes to an uncomfortable heat as you giggled less and less at what I said)

The crunching of leaves under our feet was our music when we walked home from school.

Orange leaves clung to their branches like we stuck to one another. Our souls felt fed when we were together as though it were a neverending feast.

(* No matter how pretty, the leaves left the branches as the season insisted. I wondered if you were the leaf or if you were the branch. Either way, our feast had ended and the spoils long having rotted)

The world became covered in the sun’s rays as you shielded your eyes from the bright yellow beams it radiated after the rain storm. The world seemed hopeful again after the wet greyness the rain had brought with it.

( *As quickly as that hope was there, its beams disappeared without me wanting it to behind harder to be rid of clouds)

“ It’s so lush” I said in awe at the tall, green and leafy trees in front of us. Walking through that path of trees had me noticing the canopy they seemed to form in order to keep themselves balanced and even.

(* Unlike those trees, our support system was not as strong as we’d thought before and we grew to different lengths and to different parts, away from the other)

Blue was the colour of my nail polish that I chipped off my nails when we walked together in the dead of winter. Everything seemed to have lost its luster under the cold of the season leaving behind this look alike of what was once there

( The look alike in retrospect, was our friendship melting faster than the sheets of ice on the shingles of that little house we use to pass on our walks home)

You talked to me less and less after that winter and on the eve of spring, I saw you talk to a girl in an indigo sweater. I hadn’t seen you be so full of joy in quite a while.

( I walked away as I accepted the inevitable change we would experience with a defeated sigh and sad eyes)

We drifted so far apart that one day when I passed you on my way to class, you were only a purple smear of a shirt.

I paused and turned to look at you but you never spared me a glance and went to wave to your new friend.

You wore that same shirt, the first time we spoke.

( In another reality, we were still friends but I am in this one and there isn’t much rhyme or reason in our drifting*)

I had been through a spectrum of feelings and gone through that same experience again with you. Did you ever feel anything?

i remember all the promises you told me
you will make a name for yourself
all of your efforts will pay off
i will always be proud of you
with a proud grin and shiny eyes,
filled with ambition, i believed you.
your words, those promises became an impenetrable armour.
without realising it, some of your vows began to crumble
they rusted off and i had to slowly get rid of that armour
try as i did, i thought i was still invincible, even with only a scrap of metal left on my chest
but once that scrap was weathered off me, i could not keep up
my proud grin; it'd became harder down the road to genuinely smile
and came as a welcome once i let my face muscles relax
that lustre in my eyes had faded too like a blown out candle
naked and confused, i questioned why you would build me so high
only to allow me to become nothing
i had to rebuild myself.
searching, i found bits and pieces of the declarations you had used
to gas me up and created something new
it was not only your words though, i added my own
you had fallen, but risen into a new you
* keep moving forward
i didn't rebuild that armour; all it had down was weigh me down
so i created a shield
and in that centre of that lay words i don't think i could ever get rid of
i will always be proud of you