I Noticed You Online | English Love Poems | Heart Touching Poetry English | Emotional Poetry English

[00:00:00]I noticed you online.

[00:00:02]I noticed you online the way a woman notices a bruise she doesn't remember earning.

[00:00:08]Suddenly and then everywhere.

[00:00:12]A green dot.

[00:00:14]A little circle of light that meant somewhere in some room I have never seen and will never see your hand was moving a mouse. Your eyes were doing the thing eyes do when they are deciding whether to look at something or someone. I was folding laundry when I saw it.

[00:00:34]I want that detail in the record.

[00:00:37]Not candlelight.

[00:00:38]Not a rain-streaked window.

[00:00:41]A basket of my own warm socks, static clung to a towel and my phone lit up beside the fabric softener like a second, smaller sun that only I could see, that only I would worship.

[00:00:57]This is a confession, not a love letter.

[00:01:00]Though I understand they can look alike from certain angles, in certain lights, the way a scream and a laugh can look alike on a face if you catch it at the wrong half second.

[00:01:13]I want to tell you what it is to be 41 and still capable of this. This lurch, this coin dropped down the well of the sternum, this old humiliating machinery grinding back to life because a small dot turned green.

[00:01:29]I thought I was past it. I thought I had already given my youth to this exact stupidity and been refunded finally with interest in the form of quiet.

[00:01:43]In the form of a husband who sleeps like a filing cabinet, neat and closed and untroubled by dreams, in the form of a mortgage and a kitchen with good light and a dog who loves me uncomplicatedly, the way I used to want to be loved before I understood that uncomplicated love is what you get from animals and infants, not from people who can type.

[00:02:09]I noticed you online at 11:47 p.m. I know because I looked at the clock.

[00:02:14]The way you look at a clock in a hospital waiting room, memorizing it as if the time itself might be evidence later, might be asked of me in some tribunal of my own making, presided over by the version of myself who is disappointed in this version of myself who is always in session, who never adjourns.

[00:02:39]I did not message you.

[00:02:41]I want that on the record, too.

[00:02:43]I sat there with my thumb over the little bubble where a conversation could have started, where two blue check marks could have become a whole architecture, a whole weather system, and I did not build it. I let the dot glow. I let it go from green to gray the way you let a fire go from flame to coal, telling yourself the coal is safer.

[00:03:07]The coal will not burn the house down, not knowing yet that coal burns hotter, longer, quieter, and that is the whole danger of it. No one calls the fire department for something that isn't visibly on fire.

[00:03:23]I want to explain the noticing, the wanting is old news. The wanting is a rerun I could recite along with the actors, but the noticing, the mechanism of it, the way the brain builds a room around a single point of light, and then convinces you you've always lived there.

[00:03:44]I built a room around your green dot.

[00:03:47]I furnished it badly and with great care, the way you decorate a house you know you are not allowed to move into. I put a window in it that looked out on the version of my life where I had said something, anything, 5 years ago at the party with the bad wine and the good music when you stood by the bookshelf pretending to read spines you'd already read and I stood by the door pretending to look for my coat.

[00:04:18]I wasn't ready to put on. I did not say the thing.

[00:04:22]I have not said the thing in 5 years.

[00:04:25]I have instead constructed an entire second life out of not saying it. A shadow country with its own language, its own currency, its own terrible anthem that only plays when I am alone in a car, at a red light, or folding laundry. Apparently, apparently, that is a triggering activity. Who could have predicted that the intimacy of matching someone else's socks would open a door in me marked do not open.

[00:04:57]I noticed you online and some old unkillable animal in my chest sat up on its hind legs and began very quietly to howl.

[00:05:09]I am aware of how this sounds. I am aware that confession is supposed to purchase something forgiveness, understanding a lighter sentence and I am aware I may not deserve any of the three because nothing happened, because I did not do anything, because the entire crime here took place in a courtroom with one occupant, judge and defendant and gallery all wearing my face, all disagreeing with each other in my own handwriting. But I want to tell it anyway. I want to tell it the way you tell a doctor about a pain that doesn't show up on the scan. Not because I expect a diagnosis, but because saying it out loud is its own kind of imaging, its own kind of light passed through the body to see what's really in there.

[00:05:59]So, I noticed you online.

[00:06:02]That's the whole confession, really.

[00:06:05]Everything else is just me refusing to let it be that small. Let me try again, plainer this time. I have a husband who is kind to me in the unglamorous ways that matter more than the glamorous ones.

[00:06:20]He remembers which mug I like. He doesn't flinch at my anger. He has held my hair back over multiple toilets in multiple decades without once making me feel like a burden for having a body that sometimes fails at containing itself.

[00:06:40]This is not nothing.

[00:06:42]I want to say that clearly in case this poem is read as an argument against him.

[00:06:48]It isn't.

[00:06:50]He is not the plaintiff here.

[00:06:52]Nobody is the plaintiff here. There is no court.

[00:06:56]I invented the court.

[00:06:59]I am the only one who thinks a crime occurred.

[00:07:03]I have a job I mostly like, a mother I mostly forgive, a body that mostly works, a life that, measured against almost any reasonable standard, almost any standard I myself would apply to a friend describing her own life to me, would be called good, would be called enough, would be called by the version of me who is not currently drowning in a green dot, a life to be grateful for.

[00:07:35]And I am grateful.

[00:07:37]Grief and gratitude, I have learned, share a doorway. You can stand in it holding both the way you hold a grocery bag in each hand, arms straining, not dropping either one, walking carefully up the stairs so nothing spills. So why then why the dot?

[00:08:01]Why did a single pixel turning green undo four years of very hard, very deliberate peace?

[00:08:09]I think it's this. You were the last unopened door in a house I have otherwise fully furnished, fully lived in, fully made my peace with. Every other room has been walked through, measured, painted over, turned into something useful.

[00:08:29]A nursery that never got used for a nursery, a study where I keep the good pens, a guest room for guests who rarely come.

[00:08:39]But your door I never opened. I only ever stood outside it listening for something, telling myself the listening was enough, telling myself a shut door can't hurt you the way an open one can.

[00:08:54]And then online at 11:47 p.m.

[00:08:58]I heard something move on the other side.

[00:09:01]Not a message.

[00:09:03]Not a word.

[00:09:05]Just the sound of you existing in a way I could suddenly, technologically detect, and every unopened thing in me leaned toward the sound like a plant leans toward a window it did not choose to be planted near but leans toward anyway because that is what light does to a thing that's built to want it.

[00:09:29]I am not going to open the door.

[00:09:32]I want that understood, too. Not as a moral flex, not as evidence for my own defense, but as a fact, flat and unglamorous as the mortgage, as the mugs, as the dog asleep on the good rug.

[00:09:47]I am not going to open the door because I have learned the hard way, the way you learn most useful things, that some doors are only interesting for being shut. Open them and you find what's behind every door. Dust, disappointment, a room slightly smaller than the one you built in your head, a person slightly more ordinary than the myth you constructed out of 5-year-old wine and a bookshelf and a coat you were too afraid to put on.

[00:10:22]I know this. I have always known this.

[00:10:26]Knowing it has never once stopped the leaning.

[00:10:30]That's the confession, I think. Not that I want you, but that I have built an entire second architecture of the self around the wanting and that architecture has its own plumbing, its own electricity, its own quiet hum in the walls that I can hear even now, even writing this, even having sworn an hour ago to close the laptop and go check on the dog and go to bed beside the man who remembers my mug. I noticed you online.

[00:11:06]I want to tell you what it costs to notice something and do nothing. It costs a very specific kind of exhaustion, the exhaustion of a muscle held tense for years that was never once allowed to either contract or release, just held held held in the shape of almost.

[00:11:28]I have been almost for 5 years. I am tired in a place that has no name in English, a fatigue located not in the body but in the imagined body, the one that exists only in scenarios I do not let myself finish.

[00:11:45]Here is a smaller, uglier truth, since I am confessing and might as well go all the way down. Some nights I check whether you are online the way other people check locks, compulsively, needlessly, already knowing the door is shut, checking anyway because the checking is its own small ritual of control in a life that otherwise runs on other people's schedules. My children's, if I'd had them, my husband's, my mother's, my bosses. You are the one door I get to check on my own terms, at my own hour, in my own darkness. And there is something almost holy in that ownership, blasphemous as it is to say.

[00:12:34]Holy about a green dot, about a grown woman hunched over a phone like it's a votive candle.

[00:12:41]I am not proud of the ritual. I am also not going to pretend I've stopped performing it just because I've now written it down. Writing a thing down is not the same as stopping it.

[00:12:55]I learned that from years of diaries that documented in obsessive detail behaviors I never once changed by documenting them.

[00:13:06]Confession is not correction.

[00:13:08]I want that understood, too. This poem will not save me. It is not supposed to.

[00:13:15]It is only supposed to say the true thing once, clearly, in a form that isn't a diary I'll burn or a message I'll delete before I hit send.

[00:13:26]A form that exists whether or not I ever let anyone read it, which is I realize its own kind of green dot, a light I turn on for a room I don't let anyone enter.

[00:13:43]Here is what I actually want, now that I've circled it.

[00:13:47]For 400 lines, I don't think I want you.

[00:13:51]I think I want the version of myself who was still deciding, still standing by that door, with her coat in her hand, still capable of a future that hadn't yet closed.

[00:14:04]Into this particular, decent, un-mythical shape, you are not a man to me anymore.

[00:14:12]You are a hinge, a place where my life could have swung a different direction and didn't.

[00:14:21]And some nights I miss the swinging more than I could ever miss you, which I recognize is its own kind of insult to you, to whoever you actually are now, online, at 11:47 p.m., probably not thinking of me at all, probably scrolling something stupid, probably as far from mythology as a person can get, a man with his own laundry, his own tired ankles, his own green dot that someone else, somewhere, is maybe watching right now with the exact same ravenous, useless devotion I am pouring into you. That thought should comfort me. It doesn't, quite, but it helps. It always helps a little to remember that everyone is someone's unopened door, that the whole internet is just a thousand houses full of people standing in hallways at midnight listening for a sound on the other side of a wall they built themselves and are too afraid or too wise or too tired or too in love with the lives they already chose to ever knock down.

[00:15:42]I noticed you online.

[00:15:44]I'm going to close this now.

[00:15:47]I'm going to put my phone face down on the nightstand, the green dot extinguished. The second the screen goes dark, which is either a mercy or the cruelest trick a phone can play, that you can end a longing just by turning something over.

[00:16:05]That desire, at least the manageable kind, the kind that never asked to be more than a feeling, can be silenced with the flick of a single wrist.

[00:16:18]I'm going to go check on the dog. I'm going to lie down next to a man who will not wake, who will, without knowing it, put his arm across me sometime near dawn, the way he has for years, an old animal gesture, unthinking, unglamorous, entirely embarrassingly enough, and somewhere your dot will glow and fade and glow again all night, all week, all year, a small green country I will keep visiting without ever crossing the border, a door I will keep listening at without ever turning the handle because I have learned, finally, the terrible, useful lesson that some rooms are more mine for staying just outside them and some love is realist in the specific, disciplined shape of never once letting it in.

[00:17:20]I noticed you online. That's all. That's the whole confession. I am not sorry and I am not proud and I am going to bed now. The same as every other night, a woman with a good life and a green light somewhere in her chest that she has learned mostly and I am not proud and I am going to bed now. The same as every other night, a woman with a good life and a green light somewhere in her chest that she has learned mostly to live beside the way you learn to live beside a river.

[00:18:00]Not by draining it not by damming it but by building your house close enough to hear it and far enough to stay dry.

[00:18:10]I noticed you online. I noticed you online the way a woman notices a bruise she doesn't remember earning.

[00:18:19]Suddenly and then everywhere.

[00:18:22]A green dot.

[00:18:24]A little circle of light that meant somewhere in some room I have never seen and will never see your hand was moving a mouse. Your eyes were doing the thing eyes do when they are deciding whether to look at something or someone. I was folding laundry when I saw it.

[00:18:44]I want that detail in the record.

[00:18:47]Not candlelight.

[00:18:48]Not a rain-streaked window.

[00:18:51]A basket of my own warm socks static clung to a towel and my phone lit up beside the fabric softener like a second, smaller sun that only I could see, that only I would worship. This is a confession, not a love letter. Though I understand they can look alike from certain angles, in certain lights, the way a scream and a laugh can look alike on a face if you catch it at the wrong half second.

[00:19:23]I want to tell you what it is to be 41 and still capable of this.

[00:19:28]This lurch, this coin dropped down the well of the sternum, this old humiliating machinery grinding back to life because a small dot turned green.

[00:19:40]I thought I was past it. I thought I had already given my youth to this exact stupidity and been refunded, finally, with interest in the form of quiet, in the form of a husband who sleeps like a filing cabinet, neat and closed and untroubled by dreams, in the form of a mortgage, and a kitchen with good light, and a dog who loves me uncomplicatedly, the way I used to want to be loved before I understood that uncomplicated love is what you get from animals and infants, not from people who can type.

[00:20:20]I noticed you online at 11:47 p.m. I know because I looked at the clock, the way you look at a clock in a hospital waiting room, memorizing it as if the time itself might be evidence later, might be asked of me in some tribunal of my own making, presided over by the version of myself who is disappointed in this version of myself, who is always in session, who never adjourns.

[00:20:50]I did not message you.

[00:20:52]I want that on the record, too.

[00:20:54]I sat there with my thumb over the little bubble where a conversation could have started, where two blue checkmarks could have become a whole architecture, a whole weather system, and I did not build it.

[00:21:09]I let the dot glow. I let it go from green to gray, the way you let a fire go from flame to coal, telling yourself the coal is safer. The coal will not burn the house down, not knowing yet that coal burns hotter, longer, quieter, and that is the whole danger of it. No one calls the fire department for something that isn't visibly on fire. I want to explain the noticing, not the wanting.

[00:21:38]The wanting is old news. The wanting is a rerun I could recite, along with the actors.

[00:21:45]But the noticing, the mechanism of it, the way the brain builds a room around a single point of light, and then convinces you you've always lived there.

[00:21:58]I built a room around your green dot. I furnished it badly and with great care, the way you decorate a house you know you are not allowed to move into.

[00:22:09]I put a window in it that looked out on the version of my life where I had said something, anything, 5 years ago at the party, with the bad wine and the good music, when you stood by the bookshelf pretending to read spines you'd already read, and I stood by the door pretending to look for my coat I wasn't ready to put on. I did not say the thing. I have not said the thing in 5 years.

[00:22:39]I have instead constructed an entire second life out of not saying it, a shadow country with its own language, its own currency, its own terrible anthem that only plays when I am alone, in a car, at a red light, or folding laundry. Apparently, apparently that is a triggering activity. Who could have predicted that the intimacy of matching someone else's socks would open a door in me.

[00:23:09]Mark, do not open.

[00:23:11]I noticed you online, and some old unkillable animal in my chest sat up on its hind legs and began, very quietly, to howl.

[00:23:23]I am aware of how this sounds. I am aware that confession is supposed to purchase something.

[00:23:31]Forgiveness, understanding, a lighter sentence.

[00:23:35]And I am aware I may not deserve any of the three because nothing happened.

[00:23:41]Because I did not do anything. Because the entire crime here took place in a courtroom with one occupant, judge, and defendant, and gallery, all wearing my face, all disagreeing with each other in my own handwriting.

[00:23:57]But I want to tell it anyway. I want to tell it the way you tell a doctor about a pain that doesn't show up on the scan. Not because I expect a diagnosis, but because saying it out loud is its own kind of imaging, its own kind of light passed through the body to see what's really in there.

[00:24:18]So, I noticed you online. That's the whole confession, really.

[00:24:24]Everything else is just me refusing to let it be that small.

[00:24:29]Let me try again, plainer this time.

[00:24:33]I have a husband who is kind to me in the unglamorous ways that matter more than the glamorous ones.

[00:24:40]He remembers which mug I like. He doesn't