if we break up today,

two weeks from now
you will notice again the smiley face i drew
on the chalkboard
in your kitchen
the first time i went to your house.
you will erase it but
the scratching hurts your ears and
you think about the time we made sushi together
and you want to cry but you can't.

for the next three weeks
you will find my hair in your sheets
on your clothes
on your carpet
and even after you wash your sheets,
you still feel like you can smell me when you sleep,
so you wash your sheets again,
and buy a new set but you can't
shake me; couldn't ever, could you?

about a month from now you go
to the restaurant by your house
that we went to every week,
the one where the employees recognized us,
and knew your parents by name.
the waitress there gives you a knowing look,
puts a hand on your drooping shoulder,
and gives you a free drink.
that night you cry for the first time since today.

two months after that
you are packing for college and you find
a bobby pin i dropped under your bed
and a note i hid in your sock drawer.
you can't bear to read it so you put it and the pin
in a box with
all the other things that remind you of me,
and keep packing.

that week, you tell the waitress at the restaurant
that you're leaving for college
moving away and never coming back and
you'll miss Mexican food a lot.
she tells you that
three months ago, she saw me come in
wearing tired eyes and
i ordered and ate alone.
before i left, i said good bye and gosh
i was going to miss this place.
she spied me crying in the parking lot and
that's how she knew.

a little over a year from now when you're
at your parents' house for summer break,
you open the box filled with the things that
reminded you of me:
cards, poems, pens, an empty water bottle,
the note from your sock drawer that you didn't read.
it says

use this paper to wipe your tears
if i am not there to keep you from crying.
if we break up today, remember
that i will love you longer
than you will love me. (i am here.)

my love is boundless and patient
as the tides we grew up by, always reaching,
and i
am lonesome and constant as the moon
that you can see through the window of your bedroom.

you think about how i
always had to be right, and
that was okay now because
you stopped loving me months ago, when you fell in love
with the girl in your physics class, the one who
broke your heart last week, and
you cry because

your bed has smelled of her all summer.