Poems for Someone Special

I write you letters in my head on the bus, in the shower, in the three seconds between turning off the lamp and the dark arriving. Dear you, today I saw a man carrying a fern on the subway and it looked so absurd and so gentle that I almost called you, because you were always the person I called when the world did something that couldn't wait. Dear you, I've stopped ordering for two. The menu asks how many and I don't know what to say to a question like that anymore. Dear you, it's Tuesday. Nobody cares about this except the two of us, and one of us has stopped counting. None of these letters have endings. That's the problem, isn't it? Neither did we.

We are forty now and live in different cities with different groceries. You buy oat milk. I buy the regular kind. This says everything about where we diverged and nothing about where we're the same. At seventeen we swore we'd live on the same street, raise our kids like siblings, grow old and terrible together on a porch we'd build ourselves (neither of us could build anything). Instead: you're in Portland. I'm wherever this is. Our kids have never met. Our phone calls start with sorry and end with soon. But last month you called at midnight— your voice in that specific register that means the thing you won't say yet— and I sat on the kitchen floor and listened for an hour while you circled it, and I didn't say fix it or leave him or have you tried— I just sat there, and you just talked, and it was exactly like being seventeen except we both knew that nothing would be fine, and that was fine.

She does this thing with bobby pins— holds three between her lips like small dark fish while her hands work the architecture of her hair with an engineer's precision and a sculptor's disregard for the clock. I could tell you about her eyes. I won't. You'd expect that. Instead: the way she argues with the crossword, out loud, as if six across owes her an explanation. The way she falls asleep mid-sentence and denies it absolutely. The way she keeps a list of every dog she's met, with descriptions: 'distinguished,' 'anxious,' 'would betray you for a chip.' This is the woman. Not the sum of light on cheekbone, not the catalogue of feature, but the bobby pins, the crossword, the list of dogs she's loved. These are the things I'll remember when I'm old and the light has changed.