Didnt I Used To Know You

Cigarettes and alcohol had washed her youth away. The fresh faced girl, with the wayward curl, that I knew from 'yesterday' had now been replaced, by something hard faced, playing the oldest game in town. Her painted on smile and streetwise guile trying to hide the tears of a clown. Our inner voices give us choices of the pathways we should take. It's a downward spiral, that soon goes viral, if those voices are all fake. And she had reached, and then had breached, the nadir of her life. She had once been a friend, staunch to the end, a daughter, a mother, a wife. And as we walked, so we talked, about the might have been's. The what went wrongs, remembered songs, and prom night Kings and Queens. We said goodbye and she said she would try, but I knew her cause was lost. And I'd scan the obits, for lost souls and misfits, and she'd be there, as a thaw follows frost.