The Girls We Were Poem by Carey Lenehan

In the years that have passed my friends,
How much, how little has changed?
New lines on our faces, grey in our hair,
spreading waists, shrunken dreams, growing families,
Taking the paths that life carved for us,
Following the threads of spinners tangled to chaos
For so long, we have lived, but far apart,
Halfway through our lives from
halfway through our childhoods
So when I look on you now, I ask myself,

What is left of the girls we were?

Of those laughing, foolish children,
who clung together for no reason, but friendship?
Where have our lives taken us?
Across oceans, over continents,
to the next village and back again.
Where did we go to, in all of that time?
Here, there, nowhere and everywhere.
So now, in the wake of a quarter century,
where our paths never crossed,
In the years that have passed, my friends,

Here are the girls we were.

So much, so little has changed,
Those same smiles, the times that bound us,
the laughter of our own familiar humour,
These shared memories that grow us,
the children who become us.
Down the years apart
we have found and lost families,
mothers, fathers, loves and hopes,
Through the years apart
we were broken and remade,
scorched and aged, while time ran away
with the fears and failures we could not share
But now,

Here are the women we became.

And I want to tell you,
In the years that have passed my friends,
Everything and nothing has changed
You are the girls I knew, the friends I loved
and the memories you have, are the history of me.
I am both aged and undone by you,
but despite all the years that have passed,
Despite the distances we crossed
The loves and hates of our secret selves
And the good friends who define us

We are the same girls we were