Annotated soul

"What do you do when you are not the story, but the sentence that changes how the story sounds?"

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I miss you. Sometimes more than I should, more than I want. And I know why I do.

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He belongs to a book
that was already halfway written
when I learned his handwriting.

Five years bound in cloth and routine,
a spine softened by use.
Then there was me,
a loose page slipped between chapters,
thin, intrusive, impossible to ignore.

We did not plan this annotation.
We did not sharpen the pencil.
Still, our sentences curved toward each other,
ink bleeding through margins,
notes growing teeth and feelings.
He read me aloud in a voice
he swore was only academic,
yet every syllable pressed its mouth
to my pulse.

Sometimes I imagine him
returning to the main text.
The careful prose, the familiar metaphors,
the kisses that already have footnotes.
I picture his lips repeating lines
I thought were revisions meant for me,
and the thought tears a page from my chest.
Not because they are false,
but because they are true
in more than one edition.

What do you do
when you are not the story,
but the sentence that changes how the story sounds?

I carry her like a watermark.
Every time he turns toward me,
I feel the ghost of her reading over his shoulder,
and guilt curls itself
into my descenders.
I do not hate her.
I hate the way love multiplies
without asking permission.

We call each other lovers,
quietly, like a secret promise,
as if naming it smaller
will make it less real.
But bodies are not metaphors.
Hands remember what margins cannot contain.
Some lines are underlined
because they matter too much
to be left alone.

I tell myself I will be a good reader.
I will not dog-ear his life.
I will not demand a rewrite.
Yet every time he writes to me,
the book tears a little more,
as if it knows
it will never be the same object again.

I do not know how to love him
without wanting the whole volume.
I do not know how to be gentle
when I am written in the dark.

So I stay here,
pressed between pages,
loving him in the only way I am allowed.
As the passage he returns to
when the house is quiet,
when the story he chose
does not quite explain
who he became
after he learned my name.

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If you enjoyed this poem, you might enjoy my other works:

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I know you’re here. I write something relating to ‘us’ in the tags of every poem you’ve inspired. I fear I have more of those with it than without. I love you, you know that. But I am not sure how I will ever be okay with how it is.

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