Happy New Year

The clock strikes twelve, and whilst others are kissing and celebrating, I’m looking up at the sky and thinking of you.

I lost you many years ago, and since then I haven’t found anyone like you.

You were the one who kept me living, my friend, my brother, my life-line.

We both knew the horrors that childhood bought up, abuse, non-caring – peers and others.

We laughed, and cried, and adventured, and played.

We taught each other many things, I think. You, at least, taught me what being cared for felt like.

You taught me how it felt to have a friend.

You were my friend.

I left you there, I tried to still talk to you, but it didn’t work. It dwindled, but it was always our night.

That special new night, when people reinvent themselves.

That new night. That night that always inspires.

That was our night. It is still our night, to me. It will always be our night.

But I found out that you’d gone. You had left me…

Those people forced you to take yourself away from us.

So now, as it approaches, I feel you pull me. I feel you.

As they count down the numbers to the approaching new start, I look up. I see you.

I salute you in the only way we knew how, raising a can signifying what we had.

I say hello, I speak to you. I know you’re there.

You hear me, you must, must’nt you?

I welcome in this change with you, like we always used to. Like we did when we were young.

We would always spend it together, when she – medusa – was dead to us, I would have you.

We would salute the world, the change, each other.

Each other. That’s what we had – to begin and end each old and new.

It’s approaching now. That time. Our time. And I’m alone.

You were there, and will be there. I will make sure of that.

I will look up, into the milky abyss of blackness, and see you.

You may have left this place, but you will never leave me – you can’t. I don’t think I could take it.

Although now I’m surviving, you pushed me to live.

I will never forget you, my first friend.

Happy New Year.

I recently was told a story, I shan’t go into that as it’s quite obvious from the poem (“Happy New Year”) what the story was about. I was filled with emotion about it, and astonished how much emotion came through when I was being told the story. So to get these emotions out I decided to write them down in the form of a poem.

Whilst writing this I found myself returning to the special night (New Year’s Eve at Midnight) quite a lot, mainly as that was the focus of the story I was told. I kept hearing the countdown in my head, and seeing how gleeful it made people—and then how juxtaposing their emotions are. I know, from previous experience (please, feel free to read my previous post: “The Truth”) that the countdown to the New Year can be hard, but to have spent all New Year’s Eve’s with your best friend as a child to then find out that they could no longer celebrate it with you…just hearing it I was heartbroken, let alone begin to comprehend what they were feeling.

As a child I never had friends, mainly as I was never that good at making friends. Yes, I was able to play games with my peers in the playgrounds during morning, and lunch, breaks, but none of those fellow children I would call my friends. So, knowing that the story teller also finds it hard to strike up friendships, I could only put myself in his place. I could not even begin to experience their pain (and, if I’m honest, I would be disrespectful to both the story teller and the friend they lost, if I said I understood), but I could start to see how that would affect someone. As a child I was in so much want for a friend, I felt that I needed one—even if I told myself that I didn’t. Looking back at my childhood now, I can see just how lonely I was. So for them to have found a friend, a friend that could take them away from both their cancerous home life, and the loneliness that they have experienced since, must have been a gift from God.

I was told that they only found out that their friend had died months later, as they weren’t in constant contact. Apparently they found out in the build-up to New Years. That must have killed them, inside. But they never showed it, just continuing their tradition of holding up a drink and speaking to him in the sky. I was told that they then like to spend some time remembering their friend.

I was told that they thought it was an embarrassing tradition, but I felt that it was a heart-warming tradition, that showed just how much their friend meant to them. Usually I would write a story, but I’ve always felt that truly touching subjects deserve poems (like death of a loved one, and their friendship was more of a family love).

Reading the poem, it may not feel as heart-touching as the story was, but neither myself or the story teller are very good at showing our emotions, so I felt it would be best to honour their memory by shining a light on their relationship and their friendship, and his everlasting memory to a damaged young man. A man who I have now come to call my brother, and a man who I never wish to experience this from.