Quantities Misunderstood

I thought missing you
would be a small thing—

a faint hunger in the body,
an ordinary vacancy
left by someone beautiful
stepping briefly out of the room.

But distance has a talent
for telling the truth.

It removes the person
and leaves the outline.

And there you were,
two hundred miles away,
yet somehow drawn
around everything I touched.

I went dancing.
I found old friends
and gathered new ones.
I let whole rooms
rise and fall around me.
I filled the hours with noise,
with strangers,
with the bright machinery
of being alive again.

None of it reached
the place where you were missing.

That is how I knew.

A distraction can be replaced.
An empty chair can be filled.
A silence can be buried
under enough music.

But I missed your laugh.

Not only its sound,
but the small surrender inside it—

that instant when a person forgets
to manage their face
and something unguarded
rushes through.

I missed being the reason for it.

I missed the strange geography
of our conversations,
how we begin somewhere sensible
and end three countries over,
arguing about an impossible machine
or defending a theory
I invented five minutes earlier
with my entire life.

I missed telling you
the thoughts I have not finished forming.

I missed the way
you never confuse caring for me
with agreeing with me.

How you will look directly
at one of my magnificent bad ideas
and refuse to salute.

How rare it is
to be contradicted
without being diminished.

I did not know
I would miss that.

There are apparently
whole rooms in you
I had already begun living in
without noticing.

And then there was that night.

I came to you carrying a hurt,
already braced to defend it,
already prepared to prove
I had the right to feel it.

And you arrived
with no weapons at all—

just open hands.

You listened.
You understood.
You treated what hurt me
as though the fact that it hurt
was reason enough
to hold it gently.

I cried afterward,

because somehow
you broke the part of me
that believed this was too much to ask.

Two hundred miles away,
you still managed
to prove otherwise.

So yes—

I miss you.

An unreasonable amount.

And today you are coming home.

And I am excited
in that almost-forgotten way
I thought adulthood had taken from me,

the way a child watches the driveway,
certain that something wonderful
is already on its way.

I want to see you.

I want your arms around me.

I want to hear that laugh
from close enough
to feel it move through you.

I want to tell you
every terrible idea
I have collected in your absence.

I will probably talk too long.

I will probably hold you
a little too tightly.

I will arrive carrying
the full, inconvenient acreage of myself—

all the volume
I once learned to apologize for—

and for once
I do not intend
to make myself smaller
before entering the room.

Because you have never asked me to.

Again and again
you have met my excess
without reaching for a measuring cup.

And I am beginning to suspect
that perhaps “too much”
was never a quantity at all—

only a name given to people
who were never offered
enough space.

You do.

And God,

I cannot wait
to be too much
in the same room as you again.