One Neat Square

She is the whole board—

sixty-four moods in one body,

and I have learned to read the squares

before I step.

I come home and knock on the air first,

testing which her has arrived today.

Is it the dark square—

the one that holds its breath across dinner,

that answers questions with the weight of older questions?

Or the pale one—

warm, briefly, like a window

that remembers it was once a door?

I have developed a talent for thresholds.

I read the way she sets a glass down.

The angle of her shoulders at the sink.

Whether she says hello or just

lets me walk into the silence

and find my own place in it.

Some evenings she is three of them at once—

laughing in one corner,

distant in another,

and somewhere in the middle, tender

in that particular way that costs her something.

I love her in all of them.

Even the ones that do not love me back

very well.

I have mapped her, approximately.

I know which squares are safe in rain,

which ones require patience and a certain quietness,

which ones want me loud, present, taking up space.

I move through her moods like a careful king—

one step at a time,

always aware there are pieces

I have not learned to read yet.

It is exhausting.

It is also the most interesting thing

that has ever happened to me.