If I Were A Love Poet

When I was a little girl I used to watch those Disney princesses get swept away by their princes and wonder when it would be my time. 

When I was a teenager I would watch rom-com’s and even with the twist in it where you thought it wasn’t going to work out— it always did. And I would think about how my dad left me but he came back and that maybe that meant my ex would too. 

When I was an adult I would watch dramas, the kind that don’t have happy endings but are still somewhat romanticized and I would sit in the pain of loneliness and remember what it felt like to be young and idealistic about love. 

And then I went and got divorceD and my view of romance went down the gutter along with my first marriage. And I wondered how I would enter the dating world with such a jaded heart. How could I have hope for forever when my first forever only lasted 3 years and a lot of pain?

And I’ve always been a writer but I didn’t ever consider myself a poet until recently. And even though I write with conviction and vulnerability, somehow I don’t think I’m a love poet. 

I write about love but it’s in honest ways and almost always when it’s been lost and I’m trying so hard to believe in it again. 

And so I haven’t been a love poet. 

And then I met you. 

And God it was like being a young girl again watching those movies and remembering that warm fuzzy feeling when the guy gets the girl and the soundtrack plays as all the stars line up. 

And when I looked into your eyes I didn’t see a picture perfect beginning. No I didn’t see the guy meeting the girl at the coffee shop when they both reached for the same warmed croissant or when the girl dropped her train ticket in the subway and he just happened to have another one and no I didn’t see the people who had been friends and then one day realized “it was you all along.”

No, looking at you wasn’t seeing the possibility of new beginnings. Looking at you was like watching the credits at the end of the film. It was like a highlight reel in your eyes of all the potential our lives could be and I never knew what it felt like to see the next 50 years of my life in someone’s irises, until I met you. 

And I swear I’m not a love poet but if I was I would write about your laugh and how it echos like a thunderous applause for every handwoven joke that I’ve stitched with my tongue. This FaceTime call is my Madison square garden and you are my sold out show. And if you’d let me I’d love to headline every single one of your smiles for the rest of our lives and the marquee will read “you and me, are you ready?”

No I’m really not a love poet but if I was I think I’d write an ode to your necklace. Shining silver that dangles from your neck and traces your chest hair leaving me in a trance. I’d talk about how for months I stared at it, jealous that it got to live so close to your heart every single day. And how it must have memories of the beat of your heart living inside the molecular bonds of every chain link. 

But now the ode would read about the alliance we made as it dangled in my face and whispered in my ear that I was home now. A brilliant welcome into the space of your chest that pressed into my breast and now those chains know my heart beat too. They know how ours beat together that night and I pray that if things can be people, it will comfort you on the nights we are far away and you’ll be able to feel the thump thump thumping of my beating heart in every part of you. 

God I wish I were a love poet because I could write you a melody with lines so classic that they were always stuck in your head. In the grocery store, in the car, and especially in bed late at night when even the curve of the pillow is reminding you of the curve of my spine and when words failed you, my song would dance on your tongue as you hummed yourself to sleep to the tune of my longing for you. 

You see, if I were a love poet I think I’d bundle up every insecurity and every flaw that you see and turn them into the greatest masterpiece. You’d want to read it every day and when you saw your crooked smile you’d remember how I wrote a whole sonnet about your teeth and how they greeted me into your life. How they created a home for me inside of your mouth where only truth resides. They bit through anxiety, crushed regret, and sang away fear. They grazed my bottom lip that first night and I swear I felt every hair on my body rise and fall with your breath. And you hate how skinny you are but I love how I can feel all of you when I wrap my arms around you because I had never experienced what it meant to hold the world in the palm of my hand until our first embrace and how could I ever want to lose that? 

If I were a love poet, I’d write reminders of my certainty on every worry line of your forehead. I would talk about numbers and how 1 and 9 seem so far away but if you just add a decimal, they’re one in the same. 1.9 that’s you and me. Finding that space to bring you closer to me. Because love is hard and challenges can seem insurmountable but you, my darling you, make it all seem possible. 

If I were a love poet I would spend the rest of my life immortalizing the way I feel when you say my name. And if love is a hurricane you are at a cat 5, and my guard was up like a retaining wall but you saw that and raised me the winds of perseverance and washed over every inch of my beachfront heart with waters that have seen a thousand lands.

I always thought storms were beautiful and then I knew it to be true the moment I met you. 

And I don’t know if I could ever put it all into words. It would be so hard to describe this feeling, and I’d want people to know it to be true. 

But if I were a love poet, I think I’d write about you