2 A.M. Kitchen

2 A.M. Kitchen

There is a particular silence that only exists in a kitchen at 2 a.m., shared with exactly one other person who also couldn't sleep, also didn't turn on the big light, also reached for the same mug out of habit, not thirst.

We don't talk much, these nights. You lean on the counter I keep meaning to fix. I count the tea bags left in the box and don't mention we're almost out, because some information can wait until daylight.

This is not a poem about romance, exactly — or it is, but the smaller kind, the kind that doesn't announce itself with flowers or declarations, just two people standing in the particular blue dark of a kitchen that has watched us grow, separately and together, into people who don't need the big light on to know exactly where the other one is standing.

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Ordinary Constellations

They say lovers see the whole sky in each other's eyes, and maybe that's true for people with better vocabularies than mine — what I see, most nights, is smaller: the exact freckle pattern on your left shoulder that I have never once mapped on purpose and could still draw from memory, the way you hum off-key doing something as unromantic as folding laundry, the two-second pause before you laugh at your own jokes, like you're checking whether it's safe to be delighted yet.

I don't need the whole sky. I have catalogued you instead — every small, unglamorous constellation of a person who chose, on an ordinary Tuesday, to keep choosing me, one grocery list, one phone call, one 2 a.m. kitchen at a time.