I Still Miss The Friend I Wrote This Poem For

I spent a couple of days at my mother’s house earlier this month. She has on the shelf in her office some of my very first publications, among them volume VIII, issue 1 of The Piedmont Literary Review from 1983. In it is an untitled poem of mine with an epigraph written by a woman named Adrienne, whom I thought of back then as my best friend:

The refreshing, stimulating happenings of today
Are the bittersweet memories of tomorrow
But somehow, knowing that we shared them,
Takes away the pain that they will never come again.

Adrienne composed those lines for her page in Horizons, our 11th grade year book. (In the yeshiva high school we went to, we graduated a year early.) On the inside cover, as part of her graduation message to me, she wrote this:

That’s the key to it all—you know what I mean and vice versa…We almost have to say nothing and know what the other is thinking…We can talk, talk of real things that happen, openly, and of the things that may never happen except in our imaginations…