Open letter to my first muse

A friend of mine once said
Happiness is a choice.
Her mother died, and
today with her taste for meth
she can’t keep a job.

In her spare time she
trips while watching the sun
slip behind the small ranch
house where she rents a room.

She paints the orbs of colors
she sees past the naked eye,
splashing her canvas and
scratching an itch.

At thirteen, we’d get high
in the wooden house frames
of new developments springing up
around our suburban neighborhood.

Laughing and dancing we would
cover the unfinished walls
with lines of poetry.
Those days the colors we saw
were colors enough.