The Wish

If I could find one,
just one friend
to know me,
My loneliness would slip from my shoulders
like a dressing gown
revealing my naked person,
its beauty and its flaws

There can be no greater isolation
than to be around those,
who feel they know who I truly am

All that they know is their own projection,
a likeness of a person,
a rough drawn scrawl on the back of an envelope,
two dimensional, rushed,
a vulgar grasp of two, three traits
at best similar, but never the same.

As the years pass, the distance between
me, and the people who would know me
neither widens nor narrows,
but stays at an eternal, uncomfortable length.
For two paths that meander will surely cross at some point
parallel lines never meet,
the gap between our different life journeys
is filled
with ignorance and sadness.

I am no better.
when I look at colours, mine
is surely a different shade of violet to yours
and what makes my heart tighten,
may leave you tepid.
Yet I would have you share the things
that make my soul soar,
regardless of your own reaction,
because I want you to feel
what it really is like to be me.
Olivia Harris