Game Over

Nimble, smooth, soft, fast, keys on the digital highway across borders and time.
Hello, good- bye, be safe, take care, sleep well, talk to you soon, see you, for sure.
Pictures shared, jokes and laughs, it was almost like being there,
and almost like you meant you would be here since you talked about it for
the entirety of the years the digital piper played its tune.

I pushed back the shadows I hesitated to see, the questions that still bother me.
But the game was on, fast, light, slick, fun, hey, what could possibly go wrong
in this virtual make belief friendship of ours?
You did not notice I was tired of the game, tired of the empty illusion
that something real of a long ago past could be retrieved.

I was your emotional mannequin, that you could haul around your computer screen,
and you never saw it coming, how tired I was of the repetitive make belief.
You liked the fake more than the real, the two dimensional flat illusion more
appealing to you than the real three- D me in all its undeniable complexity.
Game over. Deleted. Nothing left but an empty space where you supposedly had been.

Relief is what I feel, not sadness like you might believe or dream; there is nothing left
but the vague memory of  a naive wish that you were more than you turned out to be.


Trudi Ralston.
December 7th, 2016.
... " And let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.
For love that seeks aught but the disclosure of its own mystery is not love
but a net cast forth : and only the unprofitable is caught... " :
Kahlil Gibran,  " The Prophet "  ( 1923).


In memoriam," c. d. "