1. On our first dinner date you hid all the forks and knives beneath the table
in the restaurant so that I wouldn’t be able to hurt myself. Then you asked
the waiter to bring us spoons instead.
2. My mother caught us watching the stars in the backyard on top of the hill,
naked. When she asked us why we weren’t wearing any clothes,
I answered, “All the better to see the stars with.”
3. Your brother will die of AIDS two years from now. We will go to his funeral
together, you hanging onto my arm as if searching for a life preserver
in the middle of a stormy sea.
4. We are continuous functions, but that does not mean we are differentiable.
Our limits don’t always have to exist.
5. In fifth grade you did a research project about the Holocaust and came home
to your father, crying, with Anne Frank’s diary held in your hot little hand
like a precious stone. That was the first time you learned life was not fair.
6. Rilke wrote letters to his young poet, a 19-year-old Vienna Military officer cadet named Franz Kappus. I write letters to the moon so that it may tuck them inside its craters and shine my love down on you when you are enshrouded in dark.
7. You tell me your cousin Andrew touched you “down there” when you were twelve at a family Thanksgiving dinner. You never thought it could happen to boys, and for all the years after you will cringe at the sight of turkeys in the frozen aisle.
8. Some nights I call you at 3:04 am just to hear you breathing. We do not speak, but listen to the commas contained within one another’s sighs.
9. Two weeks from now you will bruise your thigh slipping on the ice while out running. The bruise will be shaped like Alaska, as big as the palm of my hand. I will trace its contours with my fingers, all the way from Anchorage to Fairbanks.
10. When news of the Sandy Hook shootings reaches your workplace, you immediately put your head down on the desk and won’t lift it until your boss has to come into the office and beg you to.
11. We mourn for all twenty-seven victims, Adam Lanza included, even though it’s hard. We start by lighting twenty-seven candles and then stick them all into the flower garden behind the house, where we sit and watch them all burn down to the wick, eyes shining in the dark.
12. Your father does not approve of vulnerability in men. I send him two letters in the mail every week explaining my love for you and how you are wonderful just the way you are. Emotion, I say, is never a sign of weakness.
13. The first snow this year will blanket the earth like powdered sugar. You build a snow fort for me with your bare hands, then come in twenty minutes later, numb and dripping with melted ice.
14. You ask me to marry you while we sit in that snowfort, then fashion a ring made out of ice and slide it over my finger.
15. I’ve wanted to burn down my childhood home so many times just to destroy the memories, but every time I sneak the matches from the kitchen cabinet, you come into the room just in time. You suggest I burn down your sister’s dollhouse instead.
16. Together over hot chocolate, we watch the flames caress the windows like a lover.
17. My grandmother took one look at you on her deathbed and whispered in my ear, This one’s a keeper. So I went to the locksmith after her memorial service and bought us two keys, one for your heart, one for mine. We both open one another’s doors.
18. The first movie we went to together at a drive-in theater, and we ate hamburgers in your car, kissing each other with mouths greasy from a shared carton of large fries.
19. As the pressure of a gas increases, its volume decreases. When you fold your body over mine in the dark and press down on my bones, I shrink countless times. For love, I grow smaller.
20. I want to be married to you for the rest of my life.