to be a Friend

it’s you on my worst days that’s my shoulder and my laughter. it’s you that is my lockbox and safe, where i keep the things i can’t say, can’t even bear bringing into my throat. you, who knows what i’m going to say before i say it, who’s had the same conversation with me a million times and is still not bored of it. you, who remembers who i was when i was the worst version of myself and loves me anyway, in spite, in spite, in spite.

when your sister was born, and you whispered it to me at lunch, like only the most confidential secret, when we made up fake stories about people we didn’t know and you lost your voice telling them to me, when we stayed up until midnight for my sixteenth birthday and never ran out of things to say.

you, who listens to my stupid and useless stories, everything i say when i’m too tired to think all the ones i would never tell anyone else. there’s us, in fifth grade, walking to lunch with our arms linked, and even when we never had to see each other again, there’s us, finding each other in every space in between.

i know what your favorite cat breed is, even when you forget. when i got my first phone, your number was the first one i texted. at some point, the nickname i gave you when we were eight became your only name. there’s us, not speaking for three weeks for some reason or another, and then on the phone for three hours straight.

when you got your license, we got ice cream to celebrate and you couldn’t get out of the parking lot. we sat there, embarrassed and laughing for fifteen minutes. and when we met in first grade, i don’t remember it, but superimposed into every memory i had from before, is the knowledge of you.

i could recognize you a mile away, and our text chain is at the top of my messages, and your face is a dear thing, familiar and precious, i know you, i know you, i know you. your name is a promise, a memory, it is what i’ll remember when there’s nothing else left, what remains solid and safe when nothing else is.

even if we don’t speak for five years, i’ll know you forever, and when we meet again, it’ll be like we never left. i know this as well as i know the unfailing arc of the sun across the sky, the babble of the water down the creek, the shift of the seasons every year.

there at the end, it is only my very best friend, there is you and you and you.

[Verse One]

I am spring I am summer but I long for the fall and winter nights at home. I am rain, I am heat but I long for the cold, wearing sweaters all day long.

[Chorus]

Fall wants the leaves back, Spring wants the wind back. Winter longs for heat and summer prays for snow someday. The seasons and I we hate everything we are because there’s so much we are not. It’s hard to see the beauty in the rain in March when the snow in December makes us feel alive for once.

[Verse Two]

Trying to find the beauty in my melting skin, and rain washing magma off my ashes. Maybe flowers will grow where I lay and I’ll smile because then I’ll finally be pretty.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]

Flowers eat my skin, lay your roots in my lungs. Flowers weep for me

Weep for them weep for us, and everything we are not.

Flowers growing on our ashes Bodies laid beneath your masses We aren’t beauty, they are beauty We will fall beneath your deciding jury

You are free. We are guilty. We cannot escape the chains you put us in.

[Chorus] [Outro] Seasons change, we can stay the same. We can be anyone we want to–Seasons change, we can stay the same. We can be anyone we want to be.