I Beat My Idol in a Contest and Felt Terrible
The scoreboard said victory; my bookshelf full of her work disagreed.
Her name was four lines below mine, and I wanted to throw up.
I was standing in my kitchen at eleven at night, phone in one hand, a slice of cold pizza in the other, reading the results of a poetry contest. My stomach did the thing it does when a plane starts descending. First place: me. Honorable mention, four lines down, in a smaller font: Leila Mansour.
If that name means nothing to you, I understand. Poetry fame is a small, strange currency. But to me, Leila Mansour was the whole mint.
I found her first collection, Salt Year, when I was seventeen, in a used bookstore that smelled like rain trapped in cardboard. Someone had already dog-eared it, which felt like a recommendation. I read the first poem standing up in the aisle and missed my bus... Then I missed the next one on purpose.
For a decade that book traveled with me: three cities, two breakups, one hospital waiting room. I copied her poems out by hand to learn where she broke her lines, the way you might trace a drawing to understand a wrist. There is a strip of paper taped above my desk with one of her sentences on it. It has survived four apartments and one flood.
So no, I did not enter that contest to compete with her. I did not know she was in it. You never imagine your idols standing in the same queue as you. You imagine them somewhere upstairs, being handed things.
The poem I entered was about my father's last voicemail, the one I still have not deleted, the one where he mostly talks about a lawnmower. I had spent three years writing around the grief and then, one bad Tuesday, finally wrote into it. A friend bullied me, lovingly, into sending the result to a monthly poetry contest. I pressed submit, closed the laptop... and apologized out loud to an empty room.
Then I won.
And there she was, four lines down.
I did not sleep.
First I checked whether it was a different Leila Mansour. The author bio ended that hope: same poet, same Salt Year, same author photo where she looks like she knows what you did. I read her entry five times. It was good... It was unmistakably her, that cold clean water she writes, the endings that close like a door you didn't hear open.
And here is the part I have never said out loud until now... I thought mine was better. Not louder, not cleverer. Just truer, that month. Thinking it felt like stealing from a church.
I told no one for two days. Friends found the results anyway and sent congratulations with all the exclamation marks I could not feel. My mother asked what was wrong with me. "You won," she said. "Why do you look like you hit a parked car?"
Because I had built my whole writing life on a superstition: that worship and competition live in separate rooms. Because if she could lose to me, then the ladder I had been climbing toward her did not exist. The entire architecture of someday collapsed in one results page.
Then, on the third day, an email. Subject line: "Your poem." From her.
I read the sender name and put the phone face down on the table like it was on fire.
The email was four sentences long. She congratulated me. She quoted my line about the lawnmower and said it had been following her around her kitchen since she read it. She signed off with her first name, like a person.
I wrote back at one in the morning and confessed everything: the used bookstore, the missed bus, the taped sentence above my desk, the guilt. I apologized. Actually apologized, in writing, for winning. Reading that email now, it lands somewhere between fan mail and a hostage note.
Her reply came the next evening, and I have kept it the way I keep my father's voicemail.
You did not take anything from me. A contest is not a throne, it is weather. This month the storm was yours. Write like it, and stop apologizing to people who are busy being glad you exist.
She told me she still submits everywhere, under the same rules as everyone else. She said she has lost more contests than I have entered, and then named a few, casually, like scars she was fond of. She said the honorable mention actually pleased her, because the poem was new and, in her words, still had wet feet.
Idols, it turns out, keep entering rooms as beginners. That is how they got to be idols.
I would love to tell you the guilt dissolved with one gracious email. It did not. For weeks I told the story badly at dinners, always leading with her name, always demoting myself to a fluke in my own anecdote. Somebody eventually pointed out that I was doing to myself what no judge, and no Leila, had done.
What finally fixed it was smaller and stupider.
A power cut.
One night in June the electricity died in my whole building, and I lit the emergency candle, and since there was nothing to scroll, I pulled Salt Year off the shelf and read it by candlelight like a monk. The flame wobbled. The pages went amber.
The poems had not gotten worse because I had won something. They were exactly as good as they had been when I was seventeen and missing buses on purpose.
And in the margin of page forty-one I found a note from my teenage self, one word, in pencil, pressed hard enough to dent three pages... someday.
I sat with that for a long time. The candle burned all the way down while I read. I let it.
Someday had arrived and it looked nothing like the fantasy. Nobody handed me anything upstairs. It was a kitchen, cold pizza, a knot of guilt, an email from a stranger who turned out to be a person, and now a dark room, a candle, and a book that still worked perfectly.
There is a version of ambition where your heroes are ceilings, where every great thing they write lowers the sky above you. I lived in that version for ten years and I can report back: the ceilings are imaginary. She was never above me. She was ahead of me, which is different, because ahead is a direction you can walk.
These days, when the results of that contest go up each month, I read the whole list, not just the top of it. I go looking through profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, and when one of their lines follows me around my kitchen, I write and tell them so. Four sentences. First name. Like a person.
Somewhere out there, statistically, one person has my book dog-eared. She is probably seventeen. She will beat me eventually, and she will feel terrible about it... and she will be wrong to.
Good.
Above my desk, Leila's taped sentence has a neighbor now, one of mine, on the same kind of paper, at the same height. They do not compete. They just hang there together, in the same weather.
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.