A letter from you smiles back at me
from a worn envelope on my desk.
I wrote you back at the coffee shop.
The barista called your name
And I watched someone else claim it.
It felt so foreign in someone else's mouth,
like tinfoil on her tongue.

I wrote you a letter in every overheard conversation about love,
In every time I swore I saw you in my sleep,
And every letter begins with your name,
The epigraph of my heart.

We are both lovers of the hypothetical,
The Sunday morning eggs and toast
as we watch the wind comb the trees from our apartment window.
Sometimes I wonder If we are living our hypothetical,
If the threads of our lives have come together
to form one tapestry  
or if I am one piece of your puzzle,
if one day my name will come unstuck
and fall from your lips.

But I am grateful to fall,
to have spent any fraction of time
With my name on your tongue,
And yours on mine.

The first time I said your name
It clung to my lips
And dripped down my chin like honey.
Suddenly every other name
felt like a question and
You were the answer.

The first time you said my name
I knew I would never get it back.
It bounced off the roof of your mouth
And crawled into your throat.
I haven’t seen it since.

There are seventeen knobs in my room
and three doors
that I open and close over and over again in my mind
when I can’t sleep.

Sometimes when I nudge my face into the
hollow of your neck
I count how long between each breath.
And sometimes when we walk together
I feel like the sidewalk is chasing my feet.
Like every day is an endless game of hopscotch
against the cracks in the cement.

I wish I didn’t feel like the ground
Was quicksand
And that I could pretend that
when you hold me
I don’t worry about the symmetry of your touch.
But for now,
I am grateful that you’ll sit with me
Opening and closing those doors in our minds,
Holding me so tight that all I can feel
Or think about
Is you.

Finding you in the same place
5,660 miles from home
Was like returning to a book I never finished reading
And forgetting why I ever put it down.
Like losing my place
And retracing all that I’d read before
In hopes I could find where we left off.