You ask questions sideways, 
like you're afraid of the answer 
walking straight toward you. 
I find this unbearable. 
I find this the best thing about you.

I have been watching you 
wash mugs that don't need washing 
for months now — 
which is its own kind of cartography, 
learning the shape of a person 
by the things they do when they think 
no one is mapping them.

I know every version of that gesture. 
The one that means I'm nervous. 
The one that means don't look at me. 
The one that means please look at me.

You are forty-two. 
I am trying very hard 
not to make that 
mean something.

I have loved before. 
Twice, properly. 
Once badly. 
I know the taxonomy. 
I know how it starts — 
the specific Tuesday, 
the lost sentence, 
the coat on the back of a chair 
that becomes a kind of landmark. 
That you begin, without meaning to, 
to navigate by.

And still.

Here I am, collecting you like 
I'm preparing for a long winter. 
The way you fold your arms 
when you're actually paying attention. 
The particular laugh you do 
when something surprises you into honesty —
brief, unedited, 
a door swinging open before you remember to close it.

The fact that you said probably nothing 
about someone you clearly think about 
at all hours — 
which I know because I think about you 
thinking about them, 
which is its own humiliation and 
I am making peace with that.

This is not something I planned.
I had a system. 
The system was: 
keep the tender part indoors. 
Maintain the edited version. 
Don't hand in the worse draft. 
I had been doing this for years — 
living in a house I'd insulated carefully, 
every window sealed.

And then you asked me, 
while sweeping a step that didn't need sweeping,
if I knew what love felt like 
and somewhere in the answer 
I left a window open.

I cannot find which one. 
It's cold in here now. 
I find I don't mind the cold.

The ordinary has stopped being ordinary 
since you started standing in it. 
Everything has your light. 
That is not a metaphor — 
or maybe it is, but only barely, 
only in the way all true things 
eventually become one.

I know what this means. 
I know it better than you do. 
I know the maths it does to time, 
the way it is terrible and also the only thing 
that makes me not want to keep my coat on.

So here is the poem 
I would never say out loud:
You are forty-two and you ask questions sideways 
and you make Mondays matter 
and I am thirty-six 
and I have been standing at this window 
longer than I'd like to admit.

I am failing at the system. 

I find that I do not mind.