Your mouth is the bitterness of Earl Gray tea. Earl Gray is better with cream and sugar, like those sun-bleached footprints you left behind. Earl Gray is floral, like the song of that time you almost suggested we go on a picnic, just to enjoy the softness of each other’s hair. You are Earl Gray: a chopped up, dried up blend of what is sweet in life and what is searing in life. You are Earl Gray when you offer me your teeth when I want your knuckles, your cheeks when I want your lips. You, my dear, you are Earl Gray.

Your eyes are the forgiveness of a summer’s day. You are the custard coating the back of a wooden spoon, the greedy fingers that keep the ice cream from freezing. Your eyelashes are the slow jam, the power ballad of rain-slicked dreams. Your irises are the bright blue ring-pop lips that ask if I’d like a glass of lemonade in return for one-hundredth of a hot wheels racecar. The saltiness of beach towels and crunchiness of true “sand”-wiches are the backyard sprinklers that snake between our interlocked fingers, the wind on our collarbones when we drive until we’re lost.

Your nose is that terrible dream I had of filling a home with you. A home that can hide the hours of Christmas and the minutes of New Year’s Eve, it is your nose pressed against a ripe peach that walks in on our toes slow dancing beneath my grandmother’s dinner table. A home that doesn’t even need walls or windows or floors because you swore all you needed was me, because all I want—all I need—is to wake up to that nose, softly breathing, every morning it is stormy outside.