Letter given over sidecars at Club Chuck, Valentine’s Day, 2020

After O’Hara

Dear [NAME],

I hope our life together isn’t too much of everything — I don’t want you to lose what it was like before, back when someone wasn’t always following you into the bathroom to hover by the sink while you tried to shower. It’s just that I love you most when you are your most vulnerable, like when I pause to watch you shave a cheek or peek at you undressing, when I see you sleep flat on your back with your hands clasped. I watch you a lot in the morning because in those little times there’s nothing between us but the humming potential you’ll wake up. I know I came into this with the grace of a freight train screaming across the oldest bridge in Wisconsin, but I can’t help the way I like you in our kitchen, watching your mouth list words about court opinions for which I have neither the faculty to understand nor the heart to admit that to you with (but it’s the way you say it, and now you’re sighing) but this, THIS is what it is! This unabashed love — it innervates, it allows me to wholly say that I began this letter twenty times and in each fumbling twenty tried for words to describe how I love you in a stylish way, but I do not love you in a stylish way. For what I lack in pomp, let me instead wholly say that when the space between waking and how we go out becomes too short to measure in a unit man made, I will still wonder, as I do now, at the careful mechanism of luck that made you the best of all my days.