Grocery List, Interpreted as a Love Poem

Grocery List, Interpreted as a Love Poem

You wrote milk and underlined it twice, which I have decided means come home safe, because you always underline the things you're afraid I'll forget, and never once the things you're afraid to say instead.

You wrote bread, the good kind — meaning: I noticed which one you touched longer in the aisle last week, and didn't ask why, and bought it anyway, without being told, because loving someone quietly is just memorizing what they reach for when they think no one's watching.

You wrote eggs in your normal handwriting, not because eggs mean nothing, but because some love doesn't need to be underlined to still be love — it just needs to show up, every week, in the same small handwriting, on the same small list, stuck to the same refrigerator we still, somehow, haven't gotten tired of standing in front of.

---

What the Phone Call Doesn't Say

You called at 9pm to ask if I'd eaten. I hadn't. You knew I hadn't. That's not a question, really — it's a hand reaching across four hundred miles to check that I'm still standing on the other end of it.

I said I'm fine the way people say it when they mean I miss the sound of you doing dishes in the next room, and you said okay the way people say it when they mean I heard the part you didn't say out loud, and neither of us hung up first, for eleven minutes, just breathing on either end of a silence that somehow still counted as a conversation.