The day they went away

I didn’t really notice until the day they went away,
a sudden absence of something so constant
running into them at the grocery store, stopping to chat,
our kids went to the same school
coming over in the middle of the night to fix a pipe,
they were the only ones open
politely refusing coffee, they had more stops ahead
just seemed like they’d been here forever,
then they weren’t and I noticed
a lot of other people did too