Poems with Hyperbole

You have never asked me how my day was and yet you are the only one who gets the full report: the bus, the boss, the rain, the particular injustice of the vending machine that took my coin and gave me nothing— you hear all of this with your head on my knee and your eyebrows doing that thing they do— the left one up, the right one concerned— as if you've understood every word and found it deeply troubling. You love me at my worst: unshowered, three a.m., eating cereal over the sink in a shirt I should have retired in 2019. You love me at that moment with the same unbearable enthusiasm as when I have bacon. Slightly less enthusiasm. But close. When I come home you act as if I've returned from war. Every single time. And maybe you're right— maybe the world out there is the difficult thing, and here, where you are waiting with your leash and your hope and your terrible breath, is where the armistice was signed.

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.

I mean I memorized the sound of your breathing when you're almost asleep— that slow, surrendered rhythm that tells me you feel safe enough to stop guarding whatever you guard all day. I mean I will bring you water without being asked. I will remember the name of your childhood dog and the song that makes you cry and the exact way you like your eggs, which is different on Saturdays. I mean I have seen the version of you that you don't show the world— the tired one, the scared one, the one who asks "am I enough?" at 2 AM when you think I'm sleeping— and my answer is the same every time: more than. When I say I love you, I mean I choose this. Not the butterflies— those come and go. I choose the ordinary days. The grocery runs. The arguments about the thermostat. The silences that don't need filling. I mean you are the person I want to bore with my day— every tedious detail— because somehow when I tell you, the day matters more than when I lived it. I mean I am not going anywhere. Not when it's hard. Not when it's boring. Not when you forget to text back or leave your shoes in the hallway again for the four hundredth time. I love you means: you are my favorite inconvenience. My chosen chaos. The only person whose snoring I have decided to find charming for the rest of my life. And I mean it. All of it. Every stupid, beautiful syllable.