What Love Became

When I fell in love with you, love became so many things that it had not previously been. It came before me as a kind of solid reality that I could touch when I held your hand, or taste in the crevice between your lips and your teeth, or hear in the way my name sounded in your voice with a new tenderness worn by the sandpaper of the years we spent apart, your voice undressing every letter from S to Y and tucking them in and watching them fall asleep. And every day I touch and taste you, listen to husk and affection turn to ice in the knife drawer, watch your face go from clear to cloudy to clear again, try to hold you in one place like the beaver dam holds a river, and I speak your name with an old tenderness worn by the sandpaper of the years I needed you, my voice undressing every letter from J to N and tucking them in and watching them toss and turn, still needing you, still needing you, watching you thumb a ride out of town and then thumb a ride home again. I pace the house that we don’t live in like a ghost that the new tenants try to exorcise, but when I fell in love with you love became the reality, and I became the footnote, the wraith in a hall of flesh and the white lie in a volume of truth, and I burn every day to be truer, to become what love became when you became my love.