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Sweet and Low - Augustana

Just because you've known someone for what seemed like forever doesn't mean that you get to be with them forever. Most of the time, forever is just an excuse people use because they don't know the scope of time they have.

Everyone's just clueless, and they think the word forever gets to make up for the unknown that lay in front of them.

You have no assurance that your forever is the exact same forever as everyone else's.

In that case, he had to learn on his own that forever wasn't nowhere as real as most people made it to be.

They were the perfect cliché – him and her. Childhood best friends, inseparable at kindergarten and seatmates all throughout grade school. For the first year of high school, they were lab partners, gym partners, saved each other a seat during lunch. All their classes were the same. Not one walked home without the other.

He had no idea why everything had changed without even the littlest warning.

For the first four months of his sophomore year, he'd wondered what he'ddd ever done wrong. He waited for her during enlistment, perfectly sure that their second year of high school would be the same as the first. He'd waited for hours, the whole day even, just for her not to show up. He came over at their house, her Mom telling him that she'd left early that morning.

He called and went over to their house the days after, only for him to be blown off subtly. But was it really subtle, though? It wasn't. He'd had to live through hearing numerous excuses from her parents, knowing full well that she was upstairs. And he knew that her parents knew that he could see through all of those excuses.

But that didn't help him understand any of it.

"Why are you blowing me off?"

"What have I done wrong?"

"Are you mad at me? Why?"

"Please tell me. Please."

"I'm sorry, whatever it is. I'm really sorry."

He'd confronted her many times, but she would just walk away. She would walk away as if he hadn't said anything. She would walk away as if they hadn't spent fifteen years of their life next to each other.

For the first four months of their sophomore year, he still wondered what he'd ever done wrong. He would ask his parents, he would ask her parents, but nobody wanted to answer for her.

Nobody knew why. It's not like they could read her, though. Nobody knew her better than he did, so he'd wondered why he ever thought they could answer for her.

She was his best friend, that's why it hurt. He loved her first as a sister, as his own blood, that's why it hurt.

It's not as if he'd admitted he loves her in a way greater than that. It's not as if he has done that yet.

He'd watch her from across the lunchroom where they usually ate together, as she laughed and shared food with the new people she surrounded herself with.

She was there in perfect view when a boy started hanging around her, how she looked at him as if he meant the world to her.

He watched as he walked her home from school everyday, how that boy gave her flowers and carried her books like the clichés you see in books.

He witnessed himself turn into a perfect stranger when just a couple months ago, they were the cliché. Now, he was just his own cliché, his pieces twisting while being the perfect picture of the one left behind, the one who had to fix himself on his own.