to my best friend now suddenly a stranger

To my best friend now suddenly a stranger,
I used to see the only good in the world in your eyes and you the only who saw the good in me at all.
We were the best thing about me.
You were the reason I kept trying.
And then one day
as if you had died,
you dropped out of my life.
We didn’t gradually grow apart,
one day
you just decided you didn’t want anything to do with me anymore. And I don’t blame you.
I expected it sooner or later.
But as you walked away,
everyone else I cared for followed you right out of my life. I would have done the same.
For I loved you more than I Ioved me
just as everyone else did.
We used to pick flowers together.
Examine each’s beauty before tossing most aside as if they were not worth the space in our pockets.
The rest, we carried home ever so gently
would intertwine into our hair hoping to assimilate with their beauty.
The mirror soon became our favorite place to be. We could be outside ourselves
and see as if not ourselves at all.
But outside of ourselves we saw truth.
In you I saw the beauty of every flower wrapped in your gold silk hair and saw of myself the worth of the dirt we abused as we tore flowers away.
And to this day I still ponder what you might have seen.
Roses were always my favorite flower.
You, as if a gorgeous rose,
were widely loved and the center of great inspiration.
It was with you
that I discovered the most breathtaking of roses have the most painful thorns.
And I never looked at life the same.
Roses are always brilliant
until you are compared to their beauty.
And in the end,
the beauty I saw in you
that once gave me hope,
brought me more pain than I thought imaginable.
You pushed every thorn you had onto me and left me to bleed.
Roses truly were my favorite flower. But you only loved them
when you saw one in the mirror. And now,
I can never see them the same.