Elyse

If I had known you were coming
I would have gone looking sooner,
skipped every year I spent
not yet knowing your name.

I keep doing the math on it,
counting the time we don't get back,
wishing the world had introduced us
a little earlier than it did.

But you're here now,
and that's the only part
the math has ever gotten right.

My favorite part of the day
isn't really part of the day at all:
it's the second right before it starts,
when I open my eyes and you're already there.

Hair everywhere. Half a sentence.
Still holding onto sleep.
And me, wide awake now,
thinking: this. This is the whole thing.

People chase sunsets and skylines.
I just want to keep waking up
on your side of the morning.

Two Geminis, they said.
Two people who are already two people.
Four minds in one room,
they said it would never hold.

They didn't know how we'd balance.
Your calm meeting my noise,
my fire meeting your still water,
each of us the softer edge of the other.

You're the yin to my yang, Elyse.
Not my opposite, but my other half,
the piece the shape was always missing.

You are prettier than you let yourself believe.
Not just dressed up, not just done,
but at 7am with the light coming in sideways,
in the middle of a laugh you didn't plan.

I've seen you from every angle by now.
Tired. Annoyed. Half-asleep. Radiant.
There isn't one I don't love.

I wish you could stand where I stand
and see what walks into the room
when you do.

I'm not looking anymore.
Not out of duty, not out of effort,
it's just that nothing else
has ever looked like anything since you.

There is no shortlist.
There's no version of this
where I wonder about somebody else.

It's you.
It's been you.
It's going to keep being you.

Some of my favorite memories with you
wouldn't count as memories to anyone else,
a lazy afternoon, nothing on TV,
your head on my chest, no plans at all.

Grocery runs. Long drives.
Arguing about what to eat
for twenty minutes before eating the usual.

Nobody warns you
that doing nothing with the right person
quietly turns into everything.

Halfway up that trail,
out of breath and pretending I wasn't,
you looked back at me and smiled
and I forgot how tired my legs were.

The DR sun on your shoulders.
Washington, cold hands, warm coffee,
walking with no real place to be.

People collect the destinations.
I keep the small parts:
your playlist in the car,
the airport chairs, the wrong turns,
you falling asleep on the way back.

I don't care where we're going, Elyse.
I just want to be the one
sitting next to you when we get there.

I used to think home was a place:
an address, a door, a set of keys.
Then I met you
and had to rewrite the definition.

Home is wherever you are sitting.
Home is your voice on the phone
after a day that tried me.

I could move a hundred times
and never once be homesick,
as long as you came with me.

You love me in details.
In the thing I mentioned once
that you remembered a month later.
In the way you notice when I'm quiet.

You've never made me perform for it.
Never made me earn it back.
You just hand it to me, daily,
like it costs you nothing,
when I know exactly what it's worth.

Thank you for loving me
like it's the easiest thing you do.

There's a version of my life
where I never looked up that day.
Where the timing missed by an inch
and we became two strangers who almost.

I don't want to know that version.
I only want this one,
the one where I found you,

and every ordinary Tuesday since
has had a reason to be good.

Last set, and I'm done.
Then you look over, still going,
and somehow I've got two more in me.
You've been doing that to me all year.

Not just in the gym.
In the goals I said out loud once
and you never let me forget.
In the excuses you don't accept from me,
kindly, but you don't.

You made me softer and sharper at the same time.
More patient. More disciplined.
More interested in becoming somebody
worth standing next to.

I'm better in every part of my life
since you walked into it, Elyse.
That's not a compliment, that's just the record.

I'm not in a rush
and I'm not going anywhere,
I just want the long version of this.

The apartment we outgrow.
The trips we overplan.
The birthdays, the bad weeks,
the boring Sundays that turn into decades.

One year in and I already know:
I don't want a life I get to visit you in.
I want to do the whole thing with you.

So happy anniversary, Elyse.
August 3rd, one year of you,
and the first of so many more.

I can't wait.
I really can't wait.