The Five Years I Didn't Write
I called it a break; it was a hiding. The pen waited anyway.
The pen was exactly where I left it, in the kitchen drawer with the dead batteries and the takeaway menus. Five years, and nobody had touched it, which tells you something about that drawer... and something about me.
Before the five years, I wrote every morning. Six o'clock, kitchen table, the blue notebook with the coffee ring on the cover, the kettle ticking as it cooled. I was the friend people asked to write things. Wedding toasts. A funny poem for a retirement card. Once, a breakup text, which I still feel bad about, because it was a very good breakup text and he cried, apparently, at a bus stop.
Then my father got sick... and then he got sicker... and then it was March and I was standing in a crematorium in a suit that didn't fit, reading the last thing I would write for half a decade.
The eulogy took me two nights. I remember the second night better than I remember the funeral. I remember sitting at the kitchen table at three in the morning with the blue notebook, crossing out a sentence about his hands because it scanned badly. Scanned badly. My father was three days dead and I was counting stresses like it was homework.
At the reception, over egg sandwiches, four separate people used the same word. Beautiful. It was beautiful, what you said. And every time, something in my chest closed a little further, like a fist finishing itself.
Because here is the thing I have never said out loud until now: while I was writing that eulogy, part of me was enjoying it... Not the loss. The lines. There was a sentence about how he whistled through his teeth when he reversed the car, and when I found it, the exact right shape of it, I felt the small click of a good line landing, and the click felt like joy, and the joy felt like a crime.
So I stopped.
I didn't announce it. I told people I was taking a break, which sounded reasonable, adult, temporary. It was none of those things.
A break is when you plan to come back. A hiding is when you pray nothing comes looking for you.
The five years were not dramatic. That is what nobody tells you about quitting a thing you love. There is no montage. You just get very good at almost. I almost wrote when my niece was born. I almost wrote on the first anniversary, sat in the car outside a supermarket with a till receipt and a borrowed pencil... and then I turned the radio on instead and let a phone-in about parking fines save my life.
I read constantly during those years, which felt safe, like standing on the shore of a sea you have decided to stop swimming in. I could tell you which poets I loved that half decade. I could not have told you why my hands sweated while I loved them.
What broke it open was so small I am almost embarrassed to write it down. It was two in the morning in January, I couldn't sleep, and I was doing the thing we all do, thumbing the bright rectangle in the dark, when I landed on a page of writing prompts. One line stopped my thumb: write about an object in your house that you avoid.
I knew instantly.
Not the ashes. Not the photo albums. The drawer.
I got up. Cold floor, streetlight through the blinds, the flat holding its breath. I opened the drawer and there it was among the dead batteries: his pen, the heavy silver one they gave him after thirty years at the plant, the one I had used for the eulogy because it felt like he was helping me hold it. I had put it in that drawer the day after the funeral the way you put down something hot.
I sat at the kitchen table in my coat, because the heating was off and I was afraid that if I went to fetch a jumper I would also fetch a reason, and I wrote the worst poem of my life.
I mean that. It was terrible. It rhymed in places entirely by accident. It used the word soul twice, which the younger me would have mocked openly and at length. It took eleven minutes, and when I finished, my face was wet and the kettle wasn't even on... and it was the best I had felt in five years.
Here is what I learned in the weeks after, writing badly at 2 a.m. like a teenager sneaking out of the house: I had spent five years believing my crime was feeling joy while writing about grief. It took coming back to understand there had been no crime. The click of a good line is not a betrayal of the dead. It is the whistling through the teeth. It is the perfect reverse park. Taking a broken thing and stubbornly wanting it to work well was the most him thing I could possibly have done.
Months later I finally wrote about the grief instead of around it. Around it is easier. Around it gets you poems about autumn. Through it got me a poem about a silver pen in a drawer of dead batteries, and when it was done I did something I had not done since before: I let another human being read it. Then, hands genuinely shaking over the keyboard, I entered it into a monthly poetry contest, not because I thought it would win, but because a poem kept in a drawer is just a hiding with line breaks.
It didn't win.
The email was kind about it. I read it standing in a car park and laughed out loud, startling a man loading compost into a hatchback, because the no did not matter at all. The no was proof of a yes: I had gone back in the water, and the water had noticed.
If you have stopped, I want to say the thing I needed somebody to say to me.
You are allowed back.
There is no toll booth, no penance, no five hundred words a day for a year before you have earned your chair at the table again. The page is not keeping score. It is just waiting, patient as a drawer. And whatever made you stop, shame or grief or somebody's voice you are still carrying around like a stone, it weighs less on paper than it does in you. Writing it down does not make it bigger. It makes it smaller and carryable, a stone you can finally move from your chest to your pocket, where stones belong.
My father has been gone six years now.
The pen does not live in the drawer anymore.
It lives on the kitchen table, next to the salt, in the middle of my ordinary life. And at six in the morning, while the kettle ticks as it cools, I pick it up, and somewhere a man whistles through his teeth, reversing a car forever into a summer evening, and I write.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.