What Are My Favorite Emojis? #poetry

You ask me,
bright-eyed and tilting like a sunflower when the moon forgets it's night,
"What are your favorite emojis?"

And I begin to answer—
but the tongue is a skater, slipping on neon ice.

There is the red heart,
yes, of course the red heart—
you cradle it between your fingers when words fail,
you toss it like a coin into the wishing well of me.
(But the well is bottomless, and the heart keeps falling.)

I pick the laughing face next,
the one with tears shooting sideways,
as if happiness can puncture the very membrane of sorrow
and leak through the cracks like light in a boarded-up room.
You once sent me six in a row, remember?
Each one wobbling on the screen,
each one a miniature prism of the moment we could not bear to be serious.

But wait—no,
sometimes the truth is not stitched with laughter.
Sometimes it is stitched with
the skull.
The ghost.
The black hole emoji no one has made yet.
(I keep waiting for that one.
Maybe you are already carving it pixel by pixel
inside the spaces between your sighs.)

You trace your finger along the screen,
slow as a storm cloud brewing inside a tea kettle.
"Show me more," you whisper,
but your voice is the color of fog.

So I give you the sparkling stars.
Not the five-pointed soldier stars, no—
the ones that tumble like startled fish across a deep ocean.
I send them to you late at night,
when you say you can’t sleep
and you count sheep but only find wolves.
(I send the stars as an apology for the things I never said.)

The smiley face with a cowboy hat rides into the room next,
grinning like an outlaw who just robbed sadness blind.
You always laughed at that one—
"Why does he look so proud?" you said once.
Because even clowns need armor, I wanted to say,
but I only sent another.

Reality tightens its bootstraps.
You, sitting in a blue chair.
Me, wondering if your fingers hover over the crying face or the thumbs-up.
The crying face feels like honesty.
The thumbs-up feels like surrender.
Neither feels like enough.

Suddenly the room falls sideways.
We’re in a different plane now,
where emojis hatch wings and grow roots and whisper jokes we can’t quite catch.
The avocado splits open and reveals a galaxy seed.
The panda holds a lantern filled with liquid dreams.
The party popper bursts, and out float memories dressed in party hats.

I want to ask you,
"Are you real?"
But I am too busy opening the next chest.

The emojis melt in my hands like old photographs:
the rainbow (worn thin by too many wishes),
the cherry blossom (papered over regrets),
the folded hands (sometimes prayer, sometimes apology, sometimes surrender).

You send me a fire emoji.
You mean passion.
I read it as wildfire.
You send me the eye emoji.
You mean you’re watching.
I read it as: I am being watched.

We sit, you and I,
on a wire stretched between metaphor and misunderstanding.
Below us, the abyss hums a song made of missed calls and deleted drafts.

I am tired.
You are blinking.
The hour turns over like a coin in the dark.

Still, I keep answering you.

The snowflake emoji:
coolness without cruelty.
The snail emoji:
patience even when the world is a hurricane.
The black heart emoji:
because sometimes love is not red,
sometimes it is carved from the quiet minerals of survival.

There is no emoji yet for the precise way you smiled
when I misunderstood you,
and you forgave me anyway.
There is no emoji for forgiveness without words.
There is no emoji for staying, even when the leaving is easier.

I send you the moon face.
You send back the sun.

The dialogue continues in a tongue made of symbols,
clumsy, beautiful, desperate,
like children building cities out of sand,
knowing the tide will come.

Reality yawns and tilts again.

We are not on Earth anymore.

We float somewhere between an email inbox and a galaxy folded like origami.
I can see you sending me the rocket ship.
I can see myself replying with the anchor.

The truth is,
I don’t know my favorite emojis anymore.
Maybe the mirror emoji—
the one where I can look at you and see myself,
look at myself and still find you.

Or maybe the invisible emoji.
The one we use every time we say nothing but mean everything.

The one you just sent.
I caught it, somewhere between my breath and the void.

You smile,
or maybe it’s the ghost again.

I close my eyes.
I answer without speaking.
I send you every emoji that was never invented,
every meaning that cannot be caged in a cartoon,
every goodbye that is actually a beginning.

And somewhere — behind the flicker of two screens,
you answer back.