The Apology I Could Only Write in Verse
My mouth kept failing, so I sent him fourteen honest lines.
I missed Faraz's father's funeral for a microphone. That is the sentence I could not say out loud for eight months, so let me type it slowly now: my first ever poetry reading and his father's funeral fell on the same Thursday evening, and I chose the reading.
I told myself the funeral would be crowded and the reading was once in a lifetime. I told myself he would understand, that he of all people knew what a first reading meant, since we had spent six years in his kitchen wanting one. Then I did the truly unforgivable part. When he called on Friday, voice sanded flat, and asked where I had been... I said my train got stuck outside Ghaziabad.
He said, “Okay.” Just that. Faraz has never once in his life said just okay.
He knew, of course. Somebody had tagged photos of the reading, me under the warm lights with my notebook, timestamped 7:40 p.m., roughly the moment he was standing at the graveside holding his mother's arm. The internet does not allow lies anymore; it only allows liars.
What followed was not a fight. A fight I could have survived; we had those in stock. What followed was courtesy. He replied to messages within a day, wished me on my birthday at a reasonable hour, liked exactly one out of every three things I posted. He handled me the way you handle a colleague.
Sixteen years of friendship, demoted to good terms.
I tried to apologize four times with my mouth. I want each failure on the record.
Attempt one, outside his office, I began with “Listen, about that Thursday,” and he said, “It's fine,” and the words I had rehearsed scattered like pigeons. Attempt two, on the phone, I got as far as the train and started, unbelievably, re-lying, adding detail to the fiction, a signal failure, a crowd. I heard myself decorating my own cowardice and hung up mid-sentence.
Attempt three was at Ammar's wedding, where I drank exactly enough courage to become sentimental instead of honest, which is worse. Attempt four, I stood at his actual door with actual flowers and left before ringing the bell, because through the window I could see him laughing at the television... and I could not bear to walk in and remove that laugh with my face.
The mouth is a coward's instrument.
It has an escape hatch built into every sentence, a soften here, a but there, a passive voice waiting like a getaway car. I am fluent in mouth. That was the problem.
What I knew how to do, the only thing I have ever fully known how to do, was verse. We had learned together, Faraz and I, two engineering students sneaking off to an evening poetry course like other men sneak off to bars. He loved form. I loved free verse and mocked his sonnets as furniture assembly. He would say, “The cage is the point. Put a wild thing in a cage and you can finally look at it.”
So eight months after the funeral, on a night when the ceiling fan and my conscience were making the same noise, I took out one sheet of good paper and built a cage.
A sonnet. Fourteen lines, his favorite form, the one I had laughed at. Iambic pentameter, or my limping version of it. I wrote about the microphone and the grave in the same stanza. I wrote the word coward and did not replace it with something curated. I wrote that his father once fed me dinner at midnight without asking why I was crying, and that I had repaid that man's house with an empty chair at his farewell. The rhyme scheme would not let me wriggle. Every time I tried to slip in an excuse, the meter spat it out; excuses, it turns out, never scan.
Prose explains, and explanation is where apologies go to die. Verse cannot explain. It can only confess, one costly syllable at a time.
Line nine gave me trouble. In the first draft it read, “I thought you would forgive me in a week.” It scanned beautifully and it was a lie; I had not thought about his forgiveness at all that Thursday, I had thought about my applause. But I let the lie stay, because the line was pretty. Remember this detail. It matters.
I copied the poem out by hand, no printer, so that he would see the places where the nib pressed too hard. I did not sign it with anything clever. I wrote his name on the envelope, dropped it at his gate, and went home to feel like a man who has posted his own trial.
Eleven days... Nothing.
On the twelfth day an envelope came back. Inside was my own poem, and for one hollow second I thought he had simply returned it, the way you return a defective product... Then I saw the margins.
He had edited it.
Red pen, his tutor's hand, the same hand from the evening course all those years ago. A tick next to line four. “Scans badly, keep it anyway” next to line seven, because he knew the limp in that line was real. And beside line nine, the pretty lie, one note: “This line is false. You were not thinking of me at all, and we both know it. Revise and resubmit.”
Revise and resubmit.
He was not letting me perform the apology. He was making me finish it. He had found the exact line where I had flinched, the one excuse I had smuggled into the cage, and he was standing at the door of my poem refusing to accept delivery until I removed it.
I rewrote line nine that night. It now reads, “I did not think of you. That is the crime.” It scans worse and weighs more. I posted it back, one line on one sheet, revision number two of the worst thing I have ever had to say about myself.
He called the next evening. Not a message. A call. He said, “Accepted for publication,” and his voice cracked on the second word, and mine went entirely... and for some minutes two grown men said nothing at all on a perfectly good phone line, and it was the finest conversation of my life.
We do not pretend nothing happened; that is not what forgiveness turned out to be. The empty chair stays in the story. What he gave me was stranger and better than a clean slate. He framed the sonnet, red corrections and all, and hung it in his study, where I have to see it every time I visit, my crime and his handwriting sharing one glass.
Last year, when his grief finally wanted words of its own, he wrote about his father for the first time, an unrhymed thing about a wristwatch, and read it to me before anyone else, because I had shown him where grief keeps its door, or maybe just proved the lock could be picked.
People ask why I could not simply say sorry.
Because the mouth negotiates. The poem testifies.
And some debts can only be paid in fourteen lines, at full price, with the lies edited out in red.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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