The Love Poem I Never Sent
Some words are safer folded in a drawer than spoken out loud.
There is a poem in my desk drawer that has outlived three apartments, two cities, and one wedding that was not mine. Twenty-two lines, blue ink, written in October 2011 for a boy who never got to read them.
His name was Dev, and he laughed with his whole spine. That is the first thing anyone noticed about him. In the hostel common room he would tip backward in those plastic chairs until physics itself seemed offended, and somehow he never fell. We met in second year over a stolen plate of momos and an argument about whether Jagjit Singh was overrated. He said yes. I said get out of my room.
He stayed for six years.
We were the kind of friends that other people found suspicious. We shared an umbrella through four monsoons. He knew I salted my coffee once, by accident, and drank it anyway out of stubbornness, so every birthday card he ever gave me was addressed to Salt. I knew he called his mother every Sunday at nine and lied to her about eating vegetables. When his father had his bypass surgery, I sat with Dev in a hospital corridor that smelled of phenyl and cold samosas, and he held my wrist, not my hand, my wrist, like he was checking that my pulse and his were both still there.
I wrote the poem on a Tuesday. He had fallen asleep on my floor cushions halfway through a film neither of us was watching, and the streetlight through the window grille cut his face into orange stripes, and something in my chest simply gave way, the way a shelf gives way, quietly... and then all at once.
I took out my notebook and wrote for forty minutes without stopping. Twenty-two lines. I titled it after the way he said my name when he was tired, with the last syllable rounded off, like a stone worn smooth.
Then I read it back and I was terrified of it.
It knew too much. It was not a crush written down. It was six years of Sundays, of wrist-holding, of salt. If I gave it to him and he smiled kindly and said something gentle, the poem would still exist, and so would the gentleness, and I would have to live inside both forever. So I folded it into quarters and put it under my passport in the desk drawer, which is the place you keep things you are pretending you might need at short notice.
I want to tell you I almost gave it to him a hundred times... The truth is duller and worse. I almost gave it to him twice. Once on his birthday in 2012, when I got as far as putting it in my bag and then buying him a book instead. And once on the night he told me about Sana.
He told me on the phone, which I have always been grateful for, because it meant he could not see my face doing whatever my face did. She was lovely... That was the unbearable part.
She learned my coffee order. She laughed at his terrible chair-tipping.
At their wedding I gave a toast that made three aunties cry, and Dev hugged me so hard my earring left a mark on his jaw, and I went home to my apartment and opened the drawer and did not even take the poem out. I just looked at it, folded there under the passport, like checking on a sleeping child you have decided not to wake.
The poem moved when I moved. Pune to Gurgaon, Gurgaon to Bangalore. Every time, I held it over the donation pile for a second, the way you hold a photograph of someone who has died. Every time it went back under the passport. I read an essay once, on a writing site I still visit, about why safe poems lose, how the poem that risks nothing wins nothing. I remember thinking: mine risked everything. It just never left the house.
Last February, Dev came through Bangalore for work. We met at a café with too many hanging plants, and he looked older in the specific way that happy people look older, softened rather than worn. We talked about his daughter, my job, his father's heart, which is still going. Then, while stirring his coffee, not looking at me, he said, "So I was clearing out Amma's house last month. Found my old trunk from college."
"Please tell me the physics notes survived," I said. "Future generations deserve to see a 34 percent."
"I found something with your name on it," he said.
The café kept happening around us. Milk being steamed. A spoon against a saucer somewhere.
He took out his phone and showed me a photograph of a page torn from a ruled notebook. His handwriting, which I would know anywhere, slanted left like it was walking into wind. A poem. Eighteen lines. At the top, my name. At the bottom, a date: November 2011.
Four weeks after mine.
I did not tell him about my drawer for a full minute. I have replayed that minute many times, and what I remember is deciding, actually deciding, that his marriage and his daughter and his softened happy face were not going to be collateral damage of my desk furniture. Then I told him anyway, because he was Dev, and we had never once managed to keep a secret from each other except, apparently, the only one that mattered.
We were fluent in each other in every language except the one that would have changed everything.
He put his head in his hands and laughed, and it was not really laughing. "October," he said, into his palms. "You wrote yours in October."
"You wrote yours on the back of a physics assignment," I said. "Romance is not dead."
We sat there, two people in our late thirties, holding the schematics of a bridge that was never built. He did not say what if and neither did I, because we are not cruel, and because what if is a door you can open but never fully close again. He went back to his hotel. He went back to his life, which is a good life, which I would defend with my teeth.
But something in me refused to put the poem back under the passport that night.
Instead I typed it up for the first time in fourteen years. Reading it at 34 was strange; the girl who wrote it knew things about love that I have spent a decade unlearning and apparently need back. I changed his name. I changed the city. I kept the salt. Then, before the sensible part of my brain could hold a committee meeting about it, I entered it into a monthly poetry contest, the kind where strangers judge you and you are grateful for it.
It did not win. I checked the results at work, in a bathroom stall, like a teenager. It did not even place. And I stood there holding my phone and grinning like an idiot, because losing meant it had finally... finally been read.
The original is still in my drawer. I know now that it is not waiting for Dev... and maybe it never was. It is a piece of memory with a fold line down the middle, proof that at 21 I felt something so completely that I had to write it down and so fearfully that I had to hide it. Both of those girls were telling the truth.
Some words are not meant to be sent. Some are just meant to survive you being a coward, until you are ready to let a stranger read them instead.
The drawer still sticks a little when you open it. I have never once oiled it. I like that it announces itself.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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