Certain as the Sun

Yesterday, I realized we are no longer friends
on Facebook, and I can't remember if I unfriended you first
or you did, and by unfriended, I mean fifteen years ago
I woke up in your house to a glare of a story, frustration with
my sleeptalk and dreams of violent penguins,

and Facebook has a funny way of making you think
you are friends with someone you barely know, and
by barely know, I mean I sometimes live in the summer
before tenth grade, in our friends’ pool at the cast party following
a long, exhausting melodrama, when you suggested we pretend
to kiss, your thumbs between our lips just like we practiced for
the stage, and when you leaned in, I felt something unknowable rise
in me, and maybe that is why I let you drag me underwater, to drown
the swelling want that had no name then, to fill it up with familiar,

and now I see pictures of your daughter and the husband who knows
my husband’s best friend’s wife, and in that electric space between
our keyboards, I can conjure connection to you from nothing, and by
connection, I mean I still remember every word of our friendship’s
(first) end, dictated by your Lady Macbeth, ambition my folly, and I
remember the show that changed our lives, the way we screamed and wept
behind closed curtains, our spontaneous four-part harmony, and I wonder
how you remember us, if you do at all, because I still have the notebooks
we filled with our gossip and poetry, two sides of the same girlhood,
and by girlhood, I mean you will always live somewhere in my bones,
forever fifteen and apologetic, your distinct handwriting and hierarchies,

and I wish Facebook would stop reminding me that I don't know you,
wish I could keep you in a rose tinted bell jar, unchanging and imperfect,
and by imperfect, I mean I forgive you, forgive us for not being friends,
and I forgive Facebook, I guess, for making me see that you aren't that
chipped teacup anymore, trapped in time by some great curse of fate. No,
we are both the Beast in our divergent adulthoods, transformed by all that
we know beyond ourselves, and we will always be known to one another
somehow, even if Facebook claims we aren’t, even if we never speak again.