A Friendship Poem

I stumbled upon this today...

--

You Say You Want to Be Just Friends

You say you want to be just friends,
But do you mean goodbye?
Is that the easy way to end
The wish without the why?

You owe me nothing, as I owe
You equally, and yet
There's something in the undertow
I cannot just forget.

There's something lovely like a song
That's waiting to be heard,
Or like the feelings that belong
To some unspoken word.

And so with you I cannot simply
Smile and stay aloof.
I take the risk of asking frankly
For the untold truth.

Copyright by Nicholas Gordon

---

Reminds me of the sweet, sometimes unappreciated poems that we used to write in autograph books when we were younger. My autograph book is still missing. It was last with, I can't remember her name anymore. I just hope she doesn't throw it away, so that one day, we might actually meet again, and then I might be able to reclaim my old autograph book.

CNY this year was good. I saw some interesting faces, including the Greek boyfriend of a cousin, and a long-lost cousin whom I last met years ago. And the atmosphere was good generally.

Hmmm. Although my family ties are still ok, friends have been becoming more and more distant. It's largely my own fault. I'm not one who makes a lot of time for friends, or people in general. This is because there're so many things that demand time, and there's also the fact that I have a very long 'warm-up' period. I wonder if it was ever shortened.

Anyway, I think it's important that we're good to ourselves before we can be truly good to others. To me, to be good to ourselves is to be able to keep ourselves through achievement of important goals while appreciating the journey, which is what makes life life. That means we have to prioritize, and balance living in the now and preparing for the long-term.

(But of course, this priority ladder is different from people to people. Or sometimes, it's so vague that we end up regretting our prior decisions, or sometimes we regret difficult choices when we need not, especially when there was already a 'sunk cost'.)

Haha. This style of self-talk, was influenced by the fable "The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari" which my sister borrowed from her library, which I read over CNY because it was the only short storybook available to me. The book's good, its presentation is better than many other self-help books, which I guess, explains why it was a bestseller for quite many weeks.

Hmm. I think my grammar in speech is becoming really bad, maybe because I have not been talkative enough nor book-reading enough for quite a long while. Nonetheless, I enjoy conjuring new words or new phrases everyday, just as much as a lot of manglish/singlish users. (:

Haha. I just found my old stash of poems that I long ago immortalized on Angelfire, which was one of the few free website providers then. Back then, I still used my old email (which by the way, isn't supposed to sound narcissistic, but to sound like joys forever). I remember especially liking the Friends 2 poem.