My baby and me—we’ve got this...thing. See, she lives in Baltimore, and I just moved to San Francisco for college. We don’t get to talk too much since the long-distance bill would be killer. Instead, every night, we go outside wherever we are (usually somewhere dark and quiet), and we stare at the moon.

I look at those dark-grey crevices and strain my eyes to find the dark side of the moon and wonder if my baby does the same thing. She once told me that she likes to "gaze at that big, yellow orb and swirl the crater shadows" until she sees my face. My baby, in case you can’t tell, is a poet.

We agreed to do this every night we’re apart until we meet again. While I’m cramming for a history exam, she’s sitting in her all-girl school trying to get enough A's to win a scholarship and be with me. I warned her that long-distance relationships don’t always work out, but she looked at me with those Baltimore-baby blue eyes, so I said that it was worth a shot. She said she knows we can make it work. My baby is quite the optimist.

Before I left, she told me that as long as there’s a moon, we’ll always be together. She will always be my "baby," and I will always be her "babe." But there ain’t no moon out tonight, so what’s a lonely babe to do?

My new baby and me...we do what me and my Baltimore baby can’t. We go somewhere dark and quiet and party till the sun comes up. There ain’t no moon watching me when it’s cloudy; there ain’t no Baltimore baby on my mind when the moon is black and new. She was right—when there’s a moon, my heart belongs to her, but the moon’s a fickle lover, and so am I.