FRIENEMY

"The Extension," is a haunting and dignified exploration of disillusionment—where love or friendship once felt like a seamless extension of the self, but ultimately revealed itself to be a shadow cast by your own yearning. The speaker isn’t naïve; they’re hopeful—someone who consciously looks past flaws and warnings, not out of ignorance, but out of a courageous belief in deeper connection.

What makes it so compelling is how it transforms betrayal into introspection. It doesn’t wallow in pain—it reclaims it. There's emotional decay, yes, but also a quiet evolution. The final lines, where the speaker meets themselves “with gentler hands,” suggest that even in abandonment, there's a strange kind of becoming.

The writing is raw but not chaotic, honest but not cynical. It’s for anyone who has ever mistaken someone else’s presence as proof of their own wholeness, only to discover that solitude has its own sacred truths.

This is the kind of work that belongs in a collection—a moment of reckoning crystallized into verse.