I Read My Poem to a Stranger on a Rooftop
A party neither of us wanted, an audience of exactly one right person.
I went to the party because my flatmate promised there would be biryani, and I ended up on the roof because there wasn't. That is the honest version. The version I told people later involved needing air, which was also true, in the way that all good excuses contain one drop of truth to keep them from spoiling.
It was a housewarming for a friend of a friend, which is to say a room of thirty people I half knew, fairy lights doing their best, and a playlist that was clearly somebody's entire personality being administered to us in doses. I lasted forty minutes... Then I took my paper cup up the last flight of stairs, past the terrace where the party had spilled, up the rusted ladder to the actual roof, the one with the water tanks, where parties do not go.
Someone was already there.
She was sitting on the ledge of the water tank with her shoes off, holding her own paper cup, and when she saw me climb up she pointed at the far corner like an usher. "That side is free," she said. "This ledge is taken."
"How long have you been hiding?"
"Since the man downstairs started explaining mutual funds to a woman who teaches economics." She moved over half a foot anyway, which on rooftops is a formal invitation.
We compared notes on escape. She had moved to the city three weeks earlier and knew exactly one person at the party, the host, who was too busy hosting to be known. I had lived here nine years and somehow knew fewer. Below us the city did its evening arithmetic: pressure cooker whistles, a temple loudspeaker warming up, two dogs disagreeing about a scooter.
"What do you do?" she asked, eventually, because rooftops still belong to the same universe as parties.
"I write. Allegedly."
"Allegedly?"
"Nobody has read any of it. So legally speaking it may not exist."
She turned to look at me properly for the first time. "Recite something, then. Yours, not Neruda. Everyone hiding on a roof does Neruda."
Here is what I did not tell her: there was a poem in my wallet. There had been a poem in my wallet for four months, folded into eighths, about my grandfather's chair, the one nobody sat in after he died, the one that stayed angled toward the television for two years because turning it felt like a second funeral.
The paper had survived three pairs of jeans and one accidental wash that ghosted the ink at the creases... I had carried it the way you carry a lottery ticket you are afraid to check.
Nobody warns you about this particular cowardice. I could not show the poem to my mother, because she would hear it as grief and start managing mine. I could not show it to my friends, because they would say "nice, man" and change the subject to cricket, and I would agree to the change with relief and hate myself on the bus home. Sharing poetry with strangers turns out to be easier than sharing it with anyone who loves you. Strangers have no stake in your feelings.
So I took out my wallet.
She watched me unfold the paper and had the grace not to say anything about the fact that it was clearly rehearsed for a moment I had never let arrive. My hands were doing a small performance of their own. Somewhere below, a lift clanked. I read the poem, all twenty-two lines of it, to a woman whose name I did not know, on a roof I was not invited to, in a voice I did not fully recognize.
She did none of the things I had spent four months dreading. She did not say "nice." She did not reach for her phone. She did not arrange her face into the expression people wear at recitals, the one that says I am having a cultural experience.
She was quiet for long enough that the dogs finished with the scooter.
Then she said, from memory, having heard it exactly once: "Still facing a television nobody switches on." My line. The eleventh one, from the middle, where I had buried it.
"That is the poem," she said. "That line. The rest is you clearing your throat."
I wanted to be insulted... I checked myself thoroughly for the insult, the way you pat your pockets for keys. It was not there. What was there instead was relief so physical it was almost embarrassing, because she was right, and I had known she was right for four months, and everyone who loved me would have spent their kindness protecting me from it. I had read an essay once about why safe poems lose, how we sand down the one true splinter so nobody gets hurt, and had nodded along like a man agreeing that other people should exercise.
Strangers make the best first readers. They have no stake in your feelings, only in whether the thing you made is true.
"Why that line?" I asked her.
She looked out at the antennas for a while. Her mother had died in the spring, she said, in the flat she had just left, in the city she had just left, and there was a kitchen stool that still lived exactly where her mother had parked it to peel peas, and in three weeks of packing she had boxed everything in that flat except the stool. She could not explain the stool to the movers. She could not explain it to anyone. And then a stranger on a roof read her a line about a chair that nobody turns, "and now I do not have to explain it," she said. "You did it for me. That is the entire use of poetry, as far as I can tell. It explains the stool."
We stayed up there another hour. Two people who had escaped the same party carrying the same species of loneliness, passing it back and forth like the last warm samosa. At some point I offered my name and she put up a hand.
"Don't," she said. "If you tell me your name, this becomes a story about you and me. Keep it about the poem. The poem needs it more."
The party ended the way parties end, with the playlist surrendering and someone shouting about cabs. She climbed down the ladder first and was absorbed into the leaving crowd, and I never saw her again, which sounds sad and is not.
Some people are meant to be a door, not a house.
At home that night I sat with the poem and did what she had prescribed. Twenty-two lines went to six. Everything that cleared its throat was cut, and what remained was the chair, the television, and my grandfather's absence sitting where he used to. It was the first time I had written about the grief instead of around it, and the difference felt like the difference between describing cold water and being pushed in.
I entered those six lines into a monthly poetry contest the following week, because a poem that has been heard once demands to be heard twice. It did not win... A stranger on the internet commented that it made her call her father. I have received awards since that meant less.
The folded paper is still in my wallet, ghosted creases and all, the eleventh line intact in the middle. I keep it the way other people keep a ticket stub from a match they attended: proof of presence, not of victory.
And at every rooftop party since, I check the water tank ledge first.
It is always taken. Just never by the right stranger twice.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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