At the Very Least

I’m sorry for your heart that cares for mine,
I’m sorry that I can’t sit still in this love.
I’m sorry because internally I’m shaking, I’m worrying, I’m scared.
I have this fear that you’ll leave my life in
one way or the other, the same way I fear 
that I'm already losing the rest of our friends.

How I wish that everyone I care for could
stay in my life forever, that we would never grow apart
and stay stuck together like this,
but our youth is on a ticking time clock, and we’re
almost out of time.

I don’t know what to say to you, yet you
still understand.              I don’t understand 
how warm you feel, how comforting
a single person’s presence can be.

The truth is, I look at my friends in the middle
of our daily lives and my heart explodes with fondness.
I catch the brightness in their eyes when they laugh
so preciously, and all I want is to give them the world,
though it feels like I have nothing to give except for 
sincere smiles and a hand to hold.

I know you are listening when I tell you these things,
but I don’t tell you that I’m scared for you the most.
Desperately, unknowingly, I’ve built a need 
for you that tells me you’re home, that tells me that I
can be so purely myself in your company,
that tells me that I should be next to you for the rest of my life.

I’m terrified that we might grow apart after our high school life ends, that I’ll lose 
the hour-long conversations and the easy bickering, 
the care that exists in your eyes and the way you make me smile,
but at the same time I don’t want you to make me a promise, I don’t want you to tell me that you’ll never leave,
or that we’ll be together for a very long time, because I know
from experience that these types of promises are empty, 
and that no human can control the paths of life.

So all I can ask of you right now is to just stay,
just stay where you are,
and I’ll do the same. I figure that even if I can’t stop
the fear, I can accept it and move back to the present.
Because in the present, you’re right here
with me and our friends and it’s not a perfect
life, not a perfect youth, but these few years at least are ours.

They’re ours to let be,
to sit in the time and the love comfortably,
and focus on the laughter at the lunch table,
the voices in our art class, 
the simplicity and complexity of it all.

Shouldn’t it be so easy to let this be easy?
Youth is a paradox.
At the very least, I have my friends.
At the very least, they have me.