His Handwriting in My Rhyming Dictionary
Under 'moon' he had written my name, years before he told me.
My name is June, which means every lazy poet in history has already rhymed me with the moon, and I have spent my whole writing life refusing to do it. This is the story of how the moon won anyway.
The dictionary itself is nothing. A paperback rhyming dictionary I bought used in college for a dollar fifty, spine broken at the M section, a coffee stain shaped like Ohio on the back cover. Poets are not supposed to admit they own one. We all own one. It lived in my tote bag for fifteen years the way other women carry pepper spray: for emergencies, and more often than I would say out loud.
I met Theo at a Tuesday night workshop above a laundromat, the kind of workshop where the radiator clanks during the sad poems and somebody always brings hummus nobody eats. He wrote short, careful poems about his father's hardware store. I wrote long, showy ones about men who were not good for me. We became the kind of friends who split a plate of fries after workshop and argued about line breaks until the diner staff started stacking chairs.
We were never single at the same time.
That is the whole tragedy of my twenties in one sentence. He dated a violinist. I dated a man named Marcus who described my poems as "cute." The years did what years do.
One summer, Theo's own rhyming dictionary got left on a train, and he borrowed mine. This was maybe the fourth year of our friendship. He kept it three months and returned it in September with a bag of peaches from his aunt's yard, and I remember nothing else about the exchange, which kills me now, knowing what I know. I took back the book that had my whole future hidden in it and I complained that the peaches were bruised.
We drifted. He moved to Providence for a while. Marcus and I ended the way a wet paper bag ends. Theo and the violinist ended too, though I did not hear about it for a year. And then, the way it goes, we were both thirty four and back in the same city at a mutual friend's book launch, and he was standing by the wine table, and he said, "Still fighting with line breaks?" and something in my chest turned over like an engine on the second try.
We did the thing properly after that. Dinners. A disastrous hike. His thumb tracing the coffee stain on the back of the dictionary once, at my kitchen table, with a strange small smile I did not think to interrogate.
Two years into us, I was up late finishing a poem for a contest deadline, the kind of deadline that makes you honest about your tools. Midnight, kitchen table, tea gone cold. The poem needed a rhyme and I was too tired to be proud. I flipped to the M section, to the one word I had sworn off, because at midnight even principled women look up moon.
And there, in the margin, in pencil, in handwriting I had seen on a hundred workshop critiques, was one word: June.
I sat very still... The refrigerator made its noise. I did the math on the pencil, the fading of it, the years of it, and my hands started shaking before my brain had finished the arithmetic.
He was asleep in the next room. I woke him up by sitting on the edge of the bed and holding the book open under the lamp like a detective in a bad film. "Explain this."
Theo looked at the page for a long time. Then he said, "That took you eight years. I honestly thought it would be faster."
Every poet looks up moon eventually. He hid my name where he knew my loneliness would one day go looking.
The summer he borrowed my dictionary, he told me, was the summer he understood he loved me. I was with Marcus. He was with the violinist. He was, in his words, a coward with a pencil. So he did the only thing his particular heart could figure out how to do: he left a message in the one place he was certain I would eventually stand, because he knew me, knew that some midnight some year I would cave and look up the obvious rhyme, and there I would be, filed where I belonged.
"It was a bet with the future," he said. "Worst case, you find it married to someone else and think, huh. Best case..." and he gestured at the bed, the lamp, the whole improbable arrangement of us.
I asked him why he never just said it, in all those diners, over all those fries, and he was quiet and then said, "Because you'd have made it a poem before I finished the sentence, and I wanted to be in the book, not the reading." I have thought about that answer for three years. I am thinking about it now, obviously, doing exactly the thing he feared, and he has made his peace with it, mostly, in exchange for approval over final drafts.
Then he told me the part that rearranged my whole floor plan.
"There are others."
He would not say how many... He would not say where. Eight years of borrowed access to my most-thumbed book, three months alone with it and a pencil, and the man had seeded my dictionary like a field.
I found the second one that same night, because I did not sleep. Under return: I will always bring this back. Under the entry for stay, in pencil so light it was almost breath... please. I sat on the kitchen floor at 3 a.m. crying over a reference book, which is the most honest sentence I have ever written about being a poet in love.
The hunt became its own era of us. I found one under brave: you already are, stop asking Marcus. One under lonely, which I will keep to myself, because it is the only sad one, and it is mine. Six in the first year. Then they got harder to find... or I got slower on purpose. You do not gulp a thing like that. You ration it, the way you ration hope in a dry season, one pale pencil line at a time.
Last October, on a completely ordinary Sunday, he asked me to look up a rhyme for forever. I told him what every poet knows, that forever rhymes with almost nothing, that it is a famously stubborn word. He said, "Look it up anyway," and his voice did something at the edges.
Under forever, in pencil that was not eight years old, that was fresh, that had been waiting maybe a week: Nothing rhymes with this. Marry me anyway.
Reader, the ring was taped inside the back cover, directly over Ohio.
We are getting married in June, because we are apparently not above it after all. The dictionary will be there, held together now by a rubber band, retired from active duty but never from service. Theo swears there is one note I have still not found... He will not confirm the page. Some nights I flip through with a flashlight like a kid, and some nights I leave it closed on purpose, because I have finally figured out what he knew all along at that diner, over those fries, in the margins of my cheapest book.
The finding is not the point.
The point is living inside a thing that still has hidden rooms.
And if the last note stays hidden until we are old, good. Let it wait for me the way he did: patient, in pencil, filed under a word I have not needed to look up yet.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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