I Didn't Mean to Find You Everywhere

I don't remember when the evening changed,
Or when the rain acquired another sound;
It used to fall and leave the pavement strange,
Now every drop seems to be looking round.

I don't remember when certain words
Stopped being merely words upon a page;
Somehow a sentence, harmless as it was,
Could leave your voice behind it like a trace.

And songs are worse. I cannot hear the first
Few seconds of a melody these days
Without remembering the little things
You said, and how you said them, not the phrase.

The strangest part is nothing really changed.
The same old windows gather evening light;
The same old streets grow quiet after rain,
The same moon crosses over every night.

But now I pass a place we never shared
And wonder what you'd notice if you came;
A patch of sunlight resting on a chair,
A crooked sign, a flower without a name.

I think of telling you about the sky,
Then laugh because the sky is hardly new;
Yet somehow it becomes a different thing
The moment I imagine showing you.

There are small things I have begun to keep:
A phrase you said that should have meant no more
Than any other sentence spoken once,
Yet somehow I remember every word.

A song I didn't even like before.
A certain hour when daylight turns to gold.
The quiet after everyone has gone.
The sort of rain that makes the windows cold.

None of these belong to you at all.
You never asked the evening to turn blue,
Never taught the rain to fall a certain way,
Never told the world to make me think of you.

And still, the world has grown more full of signs,
Not because you scattered them around,
But because loving you has taught my heart
How much there is to find in what I found.

Perhaps that is the strangest part of love:
It does not always make the world brand-new.
Sometimes it simply gives the ordinary
A reason to become extraordinary to you.

So if you ever wonder what you've done,
Why I can find you where you've never been,
I couldn't point to one particular day,
Or name the moment everything began.

I only know the world was once a world,
And then, somehow, I started seeing through
A thousand little windows I had missed,
And every one of them looked a little like you.

I didn't mean to carry you this far,
Into the rain, the songs, the afternoon;
I simply loved you long enough, I guess,
That everything began to learn you too.