Remember how we fought
at four and five –
over whose turn it was
to push the baby buggy?
Your Campbell soup baby face
locks curlier than mine;
eyes a brighter sparkle
How you withdrew from me with age
ashamed your mother was an alcoholic –
I did not care, carried my own secrets
How you chose drugs to cope,
while I went straight – the line
too wide to cross, it seemed.
You were my roots, dear friend
the rock I needed to ground me
Life, back then, never easy
Secrets tore us apart – projections
of judgments never actualized
somehow, I never measured up
I see you now, shrouded in the mist
of my own grief, understand that your turmoil
ran deeper than I had known, and one day
when we meet in Heaven,
I will embrace the whole you
and we will laugh at how secrets
whose very disclosure would have solidified us
kept us more and more distant – so little
did we know of love at the time.
(Lorraine died at the age of 26 – complications from drug use. After her death, I learned that she was a lesbian, a secret that she thought she could not share with me at the time. She had not known that I would not have judged her. Sadly, we never had the chance. I loved her so.)
One Woman's Quest 