Remember that story you loved? It was yours

The first time you crumpled and chucked a corner of your life it landed on the floorboards that noticed when your shoe size changed. I’ve watched you shout sentences out of your pockets, the chapters you wished away tucked under boxes in the attic

You forgot that I write sonnets even in the moments when you wish the words were different

Baked into the silence of an unchanging commute, between the lines of a receipt, stolen from the heaviness of a light beer
To praise the job of your sigh and the metrics of your laugh. The chip laid on your shoulder is self-inflicted and superficial, unfairly designing the angle of your flinch when smoothing the lines of your blazer
I’m aware that each time knowledge shakes your hand, more hesitation steals its way beneath the confidence of your brow

But I hear the words, the paragraphs, and the footnotes

They’re the flush in your cheeks when you thought you found a lifetime of pinky promises. The sound of change you accidentally drop and the way your hands hug your knees in the shower
Plot points noiselessly idle in the etchings of your sheets, in the breath of your smile and the wanting of your pace.
I listen to your worry in the unchecked list hidden by the stack of papers settled on your dresser

Yet, even when you temporize, I continue to cite moments

So that you remember how hospital beds and birthday cards and feeling last in line could not separate you from your darkest strand of hair
The purple of the raised scars underneath your shirt are smooth despite their nature, like how strokes across your lips make no mention of the pain they’ve caused
I’m in the room when you lose time contemplating time lost

Do you notice how I number the pages?

I hold a ruler to the glow of your irises when you hum under the little dipper. I’m there, studying the value of each thank you.
Integers of convention straighten your spine like the phone calls you miss, and you dither under the pressure of opportunity
I’m a witness to the metronome of your bedside lamp and how it keeps you afraid of the dark

The next sentence is always blank until it isn’t

Someday soon the gnawing of your aspirations will outweigh the chapters you believed weren’t worthwhile
Intermittent joys will steady your footsteps in new spaces,  but burn crescendos brighter than evening sunsets when you realize great things don’t always come in threes
I’ll remind you that the relief of finding will hold you like a lover when you thought there was no chair meant for you

And you’ll write for you, for me, too
The story you love, the story yet to be