The Long Spelling of Us

The Long Spelling of Us

We started as a scribbled note on crumpled notebook lines.

Two letters trading glances in a forest full of signs.

You underlined my clumsy jokes, and I circled every “thus.”

not knowing we were sounding out the long spelling of us.

---

At first, it felt like easy words—like “coffee,” “late,” and “stay.”

small verbs that fit in margins at the end of busy days.

But vowels grew teeth and consonants shook dust from every fuss;

We learned that love is not a word you rhyme with less-than-trust.

---

We mispronounced each other’s fears, we stressed the wrong syllables,

Put question marks on soft goodnights and commas where it pulls.

Our arguments were grammar wars: who owned the louder “must”?

Till silence turned to semicolons holding up our “us.”

---

You taught me how to conjugate a promise into fact.

To turn from “might” and “someday” toward the verbs that learn to act.

I taught you how an adverb like “forever” gathers rust,

and how “right now” can be enough in the long spelling of us.

---

We’ve underlined the worst of days, we’ve dog-eared fragile joy,

We’ve watched a sentence fall apart, then built a new alloy.

Some pages tore along the rings; we taped, we didn’t toss—

The margins keeping record of each beautiful small loss.

---

If someone flipped through chapters here, they’d find more cross-outs, to—

Apologies for pencil marks; revisions are colored blue.

But every smudge and edit stroke, each handwritten “I’ll adjust,”

still sounds like proof we stayed to learn the long spelling of us.

---

And when the final line arrives (no rush—we’re far from done),

I hope it isn’t neat or short, but wild and overrun—

a paragraph of breath and ink, of grit and tender fuss,

that only we can read out loud: the long spelling of us.