Sometimes I still wonder
If you continue to use the 24 dollar mascara
That made my eyelashes look stumpy
Like plump tree stumps
With rings inside to show the life that wasn’t worth living
When you’re born to be chopped into a stump.

I wonder if your eyes still close when you smile
And if your dimples still show when you’re surprised,
Or when you’d hear gossip when it wasn’t meant for your ears to drink.
I wonder if your nails still grow fast
And train for a competition against the flash
They would always win.

I wonder if you kept the handwritten letters
The alphabet was scrambled into configurations and passwords of inside jokes meant just for you
And me
And I would tell you every year how grateful I was to have a best friend that didn’t mind staring at my high bun every day.  

I wonder if you think of all the memories we made
And all the secrets I spilled
Or all the times our mouths couldn’t contain the addictive drug of laughter as our eyes spoke in parseltongue.

I wonder if you wish we’d stayed friends
And worked through the silent bystander issues
But we never ******* fought.
So we didn’t know what to do except let go
Because it felt too hard to hold onto a friendship that statistics said would grow apart

At age 16 or even 86
I will never regret the times we had
When we were kids
And didn’t know who we were so we chose to follow each other
Now I laugh at all the ******* we got away with as ‘’honors’’ students
And I’ll laugh at that too when I'm old in a wooden rocking chair staring brainlessly at the pretty view
Or I might not
In case I don’t make it to 86
Or my head is filled with everything but the memory of you.