I never thought of myself as an artist or a poet... until you said that I was one. Until your lips moved in time to the rhythm of my rhymes, and you narrowed your eyes because you couldn't comprehend the language. But your lips curved as you stole my words…

And you told me.

You were just speaking modestly. Lauding me that your emotional insolvency could never spawn a proper poem, probably. Poetry has been and always will be meant for prodigies.

But you see, I found meaning in our mindless choreography.

I found poems we strung together in hollow words balanced between our two tongues, grasping for phrases and validation like oxygen because there are a thousand glittering generalizations that I could gather from the hundreds of times we’ve corresponded that could describe the dozens of emotions that jam themselves into my psyche like pinpricks. Yet, I’ve found no words, and no poems have been written about us, no staggering works of art, or feats of nature, or glorious landmarks that I can pinpoint on the map I’d create to write my way back to you, pen in my left hand and heart in my right, but alas, such compositions will never be composed, as, you can see, I am just another teenage poet, choking on the complexities… of run-on sentences.

So maybe I can’t write you verses of poetry without the lines tangling and catching in my throat like dueling fishing rods. And I can’t capture into words the mess you made of me, the same way that I can hardly manage to capture your gaze.

So if poetry is impossible, I’ll write you fragments instead.

Take words

Off paper.

Carve whispers

into tables.

Sing hymns

of false hope

in the bark of dead maple.

But sentence fragments can’t stand on their own, and neither can we,

Spinning separate yarns on the same spindle until our alliteration sounds illiterate,

Second-guessing whether our stories are accurately reflecting our reasoning for why our ardor hasn’t yet reached reality.

And now we’re back to poems.

And I’m hoping I’ll create you one that'll turn heads the way two quotation marks create a “turn of phrase.”

I’ll write a poem about you.

About how poetry died with chivalry, and now they’re just two ideas in a casket six feet beneath our egos.

And how asking myself to describe you in words and intransitive verbs feels like comparing the star-crossed flight patterns of transient birds, writing absurd stories in our own words of us two intransigent nerds… again,

and again,

and again.

I tell myself, "Yeah, we’re two fives, but we'll always make ten.

What’s Cupid’s arrow to the power of a ballpoint pen?"

But honestly, I’m scared...

I’m scared that these words aren't my own

That I’m just printing these verses to paper so I’m never alone.

Because when I’m trapped in my head, my emotions don’t make sense

And when I put them to paper, they make even less

I could place bets on when you give up and realize you'll never be impressed.

Because, while I'm at the heart of things, I realize that you’re just a boy who couldn’t care less,

and you couldn’t possibly comprehend the language.

But I’m an artist,

And I wrote you a poem.

Isn’t that sad?

Thank you for supporting the next chapter of our lives as husband and wife!