Your sister told me last night, “Don’t feel bad if he doesn’t tell you a lot. He doesn’t really tell anyone anything. His brother is the smart one, I’m the social one, and he’s the mysterious one.” And I wondered what it must be like to be known for being unknown, for being unknowable. Because I know in your head unknowable translates to unlovable. And all I ever want to say is I-

remember the first time you opened up to me, the first time you held your heart out in your palm for me to see. You said, “It’s not a pretty sight,” and, although you still held onto it with a tight fist, the fact that you even know where it was proved something. You said love had only ever broken your heart, you said that every scar and still-bleeding wound had a name, that for every bullet-hole in your soul there was a matching mouth somewhere in the world that was no longer connected to yours. You said you couldn’t even look me in the eyes, but I wish you had, because the truth was that even then I-

was  already writing poetry about you. About how the first night you held me on my parent’s couch upstairs I spent one hour and thirty six minutes ignoring the gunshots of the movie, and instead memorized your hands. I memorized the rivers of veins under your skin. I saw how you had a scar on your right wrist shaped like a bird, and a scar on your left thumb shaped like a gun, and I thought how the lines in your palm seemed like a map that would lead me to safety if I only knew how to drive. When I told you how determined I was to take a road trip through your soul you told me you were sure that I would run out of gas, because even when I had crossed the continents on your ribcage, I still had to cross the oceans in your eyes. You said you hoped I was a good swimmer. I said I was never really good at it, no, but something in the pull of your heartbeat told me that maybe it was okay to drown. You kissed me and said love was never needing to come up for air and with every mingled breath I knew I-

wanted to connect our hearts like stars in a constellation, name it after the sound you make when you fall asleep. You joke that of all the millions of celestial bodies in the sky I always look for the same stars and maybe it’s just that I love the ones that burn brighter than the rest, the ones that are always there when I look for them. I say “Look up,” and your profile is made of the same marble the Muses used to trap gods on earth. You never thought you deserved heaven, but I never believed in it anyway. The only thing that’s truly holy is the way you say my name, like you’re naming a galaxy, like you’re drawing an invisible line from your heart to mine, solar systems forming in our chests like our organs are planets and our bones are asteroids and our lungs are filled with dust and ice from the tails of comets and darling I really just wanted to tell you I-