I’ve forced you to sleep too many nights alone
beside me. I’ve let you cry
in a room you’d built for us
while I built my life into a cell
and made you the window I look out of.
But I tell you the silence in me
would miss your voice.
The first week I ever spent without you was you
creating my world in seven days. I tell you
happy people bother me, but happy
is still what I hope you are
because if I’d never met you
I’d never have met me.
This little life we’ve made
is bigger than any word. Any wound
I’ve convinced myself has its own shores.
I say little the way most might say,
“Jupiter, from here, seems little.” The way
someone says, “A little,” after someone asks,
“Are you afraid of dying?”
I wish I could think of a better word for our life,
but I’ve never seen a star up close.
I’ve never swallowed a garden
and felt a thousand species living and dying inside me.
I’ve only sat in the dark at a wedding recently
and watched you dance
through three songs without me. Three.
Which is how many times the word happy
happens in this poem,
it’s how many people in one
God is, they say, and it’s how many times
I’ve had to learn to live without you.
Three is enough. Even for God apparently.
So after the third song,
I stood up in that crowded reception hall,
and went out to meet you.