i love you
because you showed up at my house every day before and after school, and you said it so i thought i should too. because you said it sometimes after you’d been especially terrible and it was enough, i thought (i was very young). because you seemed harmless and i was tired of harm. because you asked me if i wanted to see some poems you wrote and when you crouched down in front of a stack of papers to retrieve them, the back of your shirt rode up making the vertebrae of your spine visible under the skin of your narrow back. because i thought you were kind, and i thought that was enough (i was still young). also, you had a scar in exactly the same place, for the same reason as i did, which i thought was a sign because what were the chances? what were the chances. you, i married.