Karen Yarbrough (PurCascade@aol.com) from spider-mtc-te033.proxy.aol.com at 10/26/01 11:44AM
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    To me family isn't just the people I was forced into knowing because they are related to my mother and father... These two poems are not about the same best friend. The first poem is out of date since I have spoken with her this past week. In fact, I'm going to be a bridesmaid at her wedding next summer. (Since I have tried TWO times to post this the way I want, and it still will not let me, you will have to imagine that my post is in poetic form and not prose. The poem titles are in double astricks so you can know where they begin. Sorry for the inconvenience. Its not me. Its the board. I swear. My apologies for not being able to convert to HTML. Its just not a priority.) **Lamenting a Best Friend** My soul sister seems to have disappeared. Strange to say that. Many times she has ran away from herself, but never from me. Many times she planned to leave her family in the dust behind her as she rode off into the sunset of her life, but I was always there, with her at least in spirit if not reality, but not this time it seems, which is disappointing, hurtful, and wrong. I worry she will stumble, fall away from the good in life too soon and go back to her old ways of semi-permanent government sanctioned anklets and calling at three a.m. to ask me if I still loved her even though she was too drunk to remember that it was me she had called. I always answered yes. **A Phone Call in the Dark** A voice I haven’t heard since June bounces across the phone lines, across state lines, from a different world of drill formations and fighter jets, far off in the distant near future. We talk of girl things, that’s what she calls them, boys and love, past and present, and my new kickass boots. She asks my advice as usual, the old Crone in the Maiden’s body. She says she wants to know what I think. I know she’ll do whatever she wants, and it probably won’t be what I tell her, what I’ve repeatedly told her since freshmen year of high school, same old same old, running in those old circles of regret and dark chocolate goodness. Maybe that’s really what we both need: a trip to the mall for gold foil candy that we both swear is better than sex and target practice at the expense of electronic zombies and dinosaurs, but that arcade is closed now and Godiva is so expensive.