The Crush Poem

I'm not going to be cool about this. I've tried. I've tried the thing where you pretend you don't care and you wait three hours to text back and you act like their name doesn't make your phone feel different in your hand. I failed. Because here's what happens: you walk into a room and my brain rearranges the furniture. Every thought I had gets shoved aside to make space for the thought of you which, frankly, takes up an unreasonable amount of square footage. I know your coffee order. I know which playlist you listen to on Mondays. I know you tilt your head when you're thinking and it makes you look like a question I want to spend my whole life answering. This is ridiculous. I'm an adult. I have a mortgage and a dentist appointment and opinions about tax brackets. I should not be writing a poem about the way you said my name last Thursday like it had an extra syllable that only I could hear. But here we are. A crush is the heart before the brain gets involved. It's the purest and dumbest form of hope— the part of you that still believes the next person might be the last person. And maybe you are. Or maybe you're just a really good Thursday. Either way: I'm not being cool about this. And I don't care.