The Night I Met You

Your mouth, the first time.

A bar I didn't want to go to.

Someone else's birthday.

You were explaining something

with your hands.

I didn't hear the words,

only the shape of your certainty,

which I mistook for safety.

By the third year I can predict you.

Not the good version of knowing someone...

the tired version.

Where you finish their sentences

and feel nothing.

I am nineteen and have never been hurt,

the way you will hurt me.

I don't know this yet.

I am laughing.

The song is good.

Everything is possible

in the specific way it is only possible

before.

We move in together on a Saturday.

It rains. We eat pizza on the floor

because the table isn't built yet.

You say: this is enough.

I believe you completely.

Later I will learn,

you meant the pizza.

The argument is always the same argument.

It has many costumes.

Sometimes it wears the dishes.

Sometimes it wears the thing I said at your mother's house...

three Christmases ago...

We have stopped fighting about the argument

and started fighting about its wardrobe.

I am looking at you across a table in a bar

I didn't want to go to.

Someone else's birthday.

You are explaining something with your hands

and I am already tired,

already packing boxes in my mind,

already two years away,

already so grateful for the door,

but I don't know that yet.

So I lean in.

I ask you what you mean.

You tell me.

God help me,

I listen.

We stop speaking in November.

I send you one message in April.

You don't respond.

This is correct.

This is the kindest thing

you ever do for me,

and I know it immediately,

and I hate it anyway,

the way you hate the last step of a staircase

you didn't know was there,

the sudden ground,

the heart still falling,

the body already home.