Poems About Friendship

I've started keeping Saturdays the way some people keep a journal— every detail logged, in case one day I need proof that life was, for a time, this unreasonably good. Saturday: the bakery on Seventh where you order in that French you learned from a movie, and the woman behind the counter doesn't correct you because your confidence is its own kind of fluent. Saturday: the park bench where you read out loud to me from whatever you're obsessed with this week— this week it's octopuses, and apparently they have three hearts, and you say this as if it's a personal failing of mine that I've only got one. Saturday: the walk home, your hand in my coat pocket because you forgot your gloves— again—as if forgetting gloves is a philosophy and not just a thing you do. I don't know how to tell you that these ordinary Saturdays are the most beautiful thing I've ever failed to describe. So I keep them here, in the journal I don't write, under the heading: evidence.

There is a jacket on my chair that doesn't belong to me, and this is how you know my life has changed: I haven't moved it. Three months ago I would have hung it up or folded it or felt some small disturbance in the order of my rooms. Now it sits there like a claim— like a flag planted on a country that didn't know it was waiting to be found. His jacket smells like him— something between coffee and the outside, the particular weather of a person who walks everywhere because he says the bus is for people who've given up on thinking. I don't agree with this. I have told him so. He kissed me mid-sentence and I forgot my argument, which I suspect was the point. The jacket stays. The jacket has opinions now— it drapes itself across my morning like a soft, crumpled promise that he'll be back for his pockets and for me— in that order, probably. I've made my peace with that.

You are the person I don't clean the house for. This is the highest compliment I know. You have seen the laundry pile I call a chair. You have eaten the meal I built from whatever was expiring and said: this is great, with the specific sincerity of someone who knows that today's meal is not the point. We don't talk every day. Sometimes a month goes by and I forget to feel guilty because you've made it safe to disappear and come back without explaining where I went. When my life fell apart— the year we don't name, the one with the lawyers and the terrible apartment and the feeling that the ceiling was the most interesting thing in any room— you drove over with a box of terrible wine and a deck of cards and didn't ask me how I was. You just dealt. That's it. That's the whole story. You just dealt and I picked up my hand and we played until midnight and I didn't think about the ceiling once. The best people in your life are not the ones who make it better. They're the ones who sit with you while it isn't.