Argentina beat England,
           which means
     you won the match

       and I had to be
      the exact amount
           of gracious

       required by law.

Harry lost,
      Messi advanced,
      and my anti-Messi position
      remains morally intact…

              if competitively useless.

You said,
     “Can’t win by hate,”

     which is rude,
          accurate,

     and almost certainly not admissible
     in any court where I’m allowed
     to choose the judge.

So fine,
   you got Argentina,
       got the final,
       and the little victory lap

                    in the thread.

But the real score
    was somewhere else,

    not on the screen,
        in the bracket,

        not even in Harry’s sad,
                          noble,
         extremely English face,

             but in the missing—

The way yours came through
         with weight on it.

The way mine answered
    without needing
            to act surprised.

Vegas is doing

      _everything_

      Vegas knows how to do:

      lights,
      noise,
      carpet,
      cold rooms,
      bad odds,

      expensive drinks pretending to be decisions.

The whole city
    keeps throwing color at the walls
    like volume might eventually become feeling.

And still,
    under all of it,
    there you are—

    not quietly, exactly,
    more like the one clear sound
    the rest of the noise
    keeps failing to cover.

I’m here,
    RubyConf badge,
    hotel key,
    elevator banks,
    conversations I’m happy to have
    with people I’m happy to see.

It’s not a bad place to be,
     which isn’t the problem.

The problem is,
    every good thing
    keeps arriving
    with a second shape
    around it:

    how I’d tell you,
        how you’d laugh,
            where your hand would be,

    what face you’d make
         at whatever strange casino nonsense
            just tried to call itself decor.

I keep wanting
  to get back there,

  not back home,
        exactly,
    though, yes,
       that too.

Back to the version of the room
     where the sentence
     doesn’t have to travel through glass

                    before it reaches you.

Back to the lazy,
     ridiculous privilege
     of looking over…

     instead of typing.

But there’s no shortcut,
    not one that matters.

Even if the flights behaved,
     even if the map folded itself
     like it wanted to help,

     Monday is still Monday.

The first real place
     the two of us
     can put arms
     around all of this

     and mean it.

Which makes everything else
      feel wrapped around it:

      the conference,
          city,
          match,
          thread,

          the missing
          coming in stronger than I expected,

               yeah, even stronger than that.

Wrapped around Monday,
        not because Monday is soon.

It isn’t,
   not from here,
   not from a hotel room
   that keeps making
   its little appliance noises

   like it has something useful to add.

But Monday is ours,
    and that’s the part

    everything else keeps turning toward.

Mondays have always known
        what to do with us.

They know Irby’s,
     they know 325,
     they know the way
     one ordinary night
     can stop pretending it’s ordinary

     the moment our eyes find each other's.

So what do I do,
   what do we do
   with this much missing

   and nowhere useful to put it yet?

I think we keep wrapping,
  not tighter,
  not in the desperate way,

      tighter in the honest way:

      text by text,
      song by song,
      bad joke by bad joke,

      Argentina gloating,
      England sulking,

      you being right about hate
      in a way I will deny
      under light questioning,

      me letting Vegas be Vegas
      without asking it to become enough.

Because it won’t,
        it can’t.

This city was built
     for wanting,

     but not this kind.

This kind already has a destination,
     this kind knows the day of the week.

So I’ll do the conference,
   I’ll answer the thread,
   I’ll let the missing
   keep saying what it's saying
   without trying to make it smaller

   just because it won’t fit neatly in my pocket.

And Monday,
    when it finally gets here,
    can unwrap
    whatever we’ve been carrying

    across all this !*#@&&%@((!%?>< distance.