To a Friend

I know I was never your friend,
but I never knew
I was merely a stranger
on the road you travelled.

I never knew
that the one I had no right to call a friend
would be the very one
my heart would keep calling so,
for all the days to come.

All I knew was ..

In a city of colours
veiled beneath unfamiliar lights,
you were a place I knew.

Among a thousand names,
you were the one name
I could call.

In the emptiness wrapped around everything,
you were a kind of completeness.
A familiar star
lost somewhere in an unfamiliar sky.
At times,
the familiar tune
of a song sung alone.

The road we once walked side by side
now lies imprisoned
in a little web of words.

What I felt in the darkness,
I mistook for its shadow.
And when the light came,
I saw in you
the shape of my own imaginings.

And yet, I don't know why...

Again and again,
I became the wind
and wandered through your garden,
from day into night.

I crossed the night
as autumn dew,
sitting in the courtyard of the sky,
waiting for the moment
you might wake and see me.

Even when I was no fairy,
I called upon the moon,
if only for you.

But I never imagined
I would drift away like a cloud,
so far that even the moon
would disappear from sight.

I never knew
that not every cloud gets to touch the moon,
that not every cloud
comes down as rain.

Perhaps I would have disappeared
carrying that regret,
had I not come to understand
that I belong to no part of your kingdom,
that there is no place for me
in your city.

That moon knows only the stars.
Not the clouds
illuminated by their borrowed light.

Instead of those who walk beside,
it recognises those
who travel parallel.

This poem is not the tale
of two people walking side by side.
This story belongs
to another world altogether.

The realisation hurts.

It rises somewhere from within my chest,
gathers in my throat
like something trying to find its way out.

It has no name,
no shape.

Only a feeling,
and the handwriting of time.

Like a distant sky,
I am nowhere near you,
even when I stand before you.

Like falling snow,
I am not beside you,
even when I fall close.

Like two currents of the same ocean,
we keep flowing side by side,
yet remain forever beyond each other's reach.

Sometimes in anger,
sometimes in wounded pride,
I've tried to forget this road.

Sometimes through effort,
sometimes by losing myself in work,
I've tried to outrun this emptiness.

But each time,
I seem to lose a little more of myself,
and drift a little farther away.

How strange!

You have never really gone away from me.
Even now,
I keep rushing along your path as the wind,
drifting towards you as a cloud.

Perhaps I am not a companion
on the road you travel.

But I am a star
somewhere in your sky.

I am the breeze
of your sunlit days,
the coolness
of your cloudy afternoons.

I am a witness
to the pages you've left behind,
a quiet reader
of all that time has carried away.

What need is there
for you to tell me
that you no longer know me?

Perhaps you've forgotten.
Let it be.

I'll keep calling you,
all day long.