KNOW ALMOST NOTHING

The poem traces the arc of a close friendship (or a sibling-like bond) from its unguarded closeness in childhood/youth through the slow, ordinary drift of adulthood into distance, and finally toward the speaker's attempt to make peace with that loss.

It opens by reframing the premise up front: life isn't cruel or villainous, just something that moves people along, like a river. From there it moves backward into memory, a time when the two people's world was small and complete, full of invented games, long conversations, and the unconsidered assumption that "tomorrow" would always include each other.

The middle section describes the drift itself, and is careful to insist that this drift wasn't caused by conflict or fading love, not dislike, not disappearance of feeling, but simply by time and distance doing what they do: new places, new people, new lives built elsewhere, until two people who once knew everything about each other come to know almost nothing. The poem pauses to note that this is what growing up quietly costs everyone, not just this one relationship.

The poem closes on gratitude and a kind of open-ended blessing: the speaker doesn't resolve the relationship or bring the two people back together, but expresses thanks for the time they had, hopes the other person's path is good to them, and leaves them with the assurance that they were once deeply loved and are not forgotten, landing on the closing paradox that letting go, rather than being the opposite of love, can itself be a form of it.

In short: it's an elegy for a faded friendship that refuses to treat the fading as a tragedy, choosing instead to read distance and separation as a natural, even loving, part of people growing into who they're meant to be.