you almost forgot that
after it happens, friends
abandon you all at once without
a word
everyone at the same time
is too busy or
not equipped or
dealing with their own shit and
you respect their reasons but
they come at such a frequency in
such an overwhelming
exodus from your life it’s like
they were all waiting together with
bated breath, refreshing their screens
for something to push them over
and out and
this is it
so you sit in increasing silence as their
dissent somehow grows louder and
all of a sudden you realize
they’ve taken with them your
will to address it at all
because if no one’s there to
validate what happened, who’s to say it ever
happened and who’s to say anyone
else is meant to care
and when you’ve lost all the people you once called
friends over something that maybe didn’t
happen, maybe you should have never
happened either
Christine M. Hopkins is a writer and journalist living in Des Moines, Iowa. She enjoys noveling, playing several instruments, and combining her journalism and psychology degrees to secretly analyze others. Her poetry and prose has appeared in and/or, tiny poetry: macropoetics, shufPoetry, and the Dubuque Area Writers Guild’s 2016 and 2017 galleries. Follow her on Twitter @christineiniowa.