Meeting her was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I wish I could say the same for her. I really wanted to be a good friend. I wanted to be exactly what every other annoying rich student was not. I never realized that someone who was so much like me could also be so unlike me as well. It was all too easy for her to hide her demons from me. I never really wanted to see them. I was happy for her when she told me she wanted to be held accountable for her life. I had no idea she meant to tell me she was asking someone else to do it. She never thought I was hard enough to do it. And I suppose I wasnt, not on her anyway. I never wanted to be that way with her.

It was then that I realized she thought I was soft. She saw in me an innocence I never found in myself. And she had to stay away from it. For her own good; for my own good. She feared the dark in herself that threatened to corrupt the clarity in me that I had not even named. I never saw it till I saw it through her eyes. I still only see it through the lens of her vision, and even then only as a revenant of a past lifes dream.

Years later she has come back to me with a hardness in her eyes. And I can tell that the innocence she used to consider a burden in now the object of her envy.

I ache to give it to her. But such things cannot be.

I know now that she is not completely bereft. She traded her innocence. More than once. And the last time she bought something precious for herself: a husband. A loving husband. Maybe she will take heart in the fact that I too can envy her. For I would give all my innocence for a love returned.

But alas, perhaps I am too eager to give it for it to be a worthy prize.