The Apartment Poem

The apartment in San Francisco is our apartment. Wood floors and beaming
bright slats of light coming through the window or a cool breeze on a fall
night. There is jazz playing through the speakers and our cats are curled
up next to us or each other on a small blue cat bed. There is grease in the
kitchen and steak sizzling. There is Drew’s dutiful knife chopping against
the cutting board and the small flesh of a vegetable wiggling beneath his
thumbs.

There is a fan churning somewhere in an all white bathroom, where the
kitten likes to sit and watch me bathe. Sometimes she crawls on top of my
naked body, in the center of the pool, like I am a mom island she has come to visit.

My fiance, soon to be husband, takes the other cat and places her on the door frame above our family room.
There she sits and purrs or meows till we bring her down.

I am sleepy in the winter and peaceful in the summers. I am sunshine and rain and every good and bad thing
that has ever happened to me has happened to us both, now. The house which is not really a house but a space
where the two of us live together is becoming a home. Slowly, slowly, as the soup cooks on the stove, as the
candles burn bright through the afternoon, as he reads one sentence to me from his book, then another, then
another. We are falling in love with each other in the best way, in the new way or the old way. We are learning
together what it is. This home we’ve built in each other. This home we’ve built in ourselves.