I’ve been a goddamn walking pile of cliches
everyday since I met you, and
nowadays, I can’t get through
a single thought without you
crossing my mind
(at all the wrong times,
like when I’m supposed to not smile,
but when you’re a pile
of goddamn cliches,
you smile anyway).
I can’t say
your name without getting an eye roll
from friends who can feel that I’m whole
with your name inside me
(it just fits so nicely
and fills a space I never knew
was there before I met you).
And I hate me, too,
for feeling so blue
when it’s been only one day since I last saw you
(but in my defense,
to be in your presence
is to know happiness
and to live without common sense
because there is nothing ordinary
about this feeling that has yet to vary
inside me, it keeps repeating,
three words that have not stopped beating
everyday since I met you.)
I wish that I could let you go,
in front of the people who won’t leave me alone
about how goddamn naive I’m being
for thinking that this boy I’m seeing
is more than just a teenage fling.
I would tell them that you’re nothing
in the big grand scheme of everything,
that needing to talk to you on the phone
is just because of angsty hormones,
that I’m eighteen, that I can’t know
what it’s like to be in the throes
of true romance, that’s for adults,
and maybe someday, when I’m grown-up,
I’ll understand what love is.
(And I think they’d leave me alone then,
and I could call you up again,
and we could go hold hands some place
where I can be just as cliche
as I need to be
without feeling so guilty
for falling into this abyss
of sickly-sweet, trite happiness.)

(I don’t think I will mind the fall.
You’ll be with me, after all.)