I Accidentally Heckled My Best Friend's Reading
I laughed at the saddest line; the poem was about me.
There is a specific sound a laugh makes in a silent room full of people holding candles, and I know it, because it came out of me at the exact center of the saddest poem my best friend ever wrote.
The venue was the back room of a wine bar called The Cellar Door, which hosted a reading on the last Friday of every month. No stage lights, just tea candles in jam jars on every table and one fat pillar candle on the stool next to the microphone, so that every poet read half in shadow, like a seance with a sign-up sheet. Sonia had been going for a year. This was the first time she was reading, and she had asked me to come the way you ask someone to hold your hand for a blood draw.
Sonia and I have known each other since we were nine. I have seen her throw up at two proms, hers and mine. I was the second person she called when her mother got the diagnosis, and I want that sentence on the record early, because this story is about what I did during the eleven months after that call, which was, and I say this with clinical accuracy... almost nothing.
I did not vanish dramatically. Nobody vanishes dramatically. I texted. I sent the right emojis. I said "let me know if you need anything," which I have since learned is the sympathy card equivalent of a coupon that expires on arrival.
I was, that year, very busy being newly promoted and newly heartbroken, and I kept planning to drive over on weekends that kept becoming... other weekends. Her mother died in March. I came to the funeral, hugged her hard, and told myself the eleven months had been forgiven because she never mentioned them.
So. The Cellar Door. Last Friday of October. Sonia gets up fourth, after a man who rhymed "whiskey" with "risky" twice in one poem, and she stands next to the pillar candle with a single sheet of paper that is visibly shaking, and she says, "This one's called Inventory."
It was a list poem. Things her mother left behind. It started with objects you would expect, reading glasses, a hairbrush with silver hair still in it, a freezer full of labeled soup, and the room got very still, the good kind of still, the kind poets would trade years of their lives for.
I was proud of her. I want that on the record too. I was sitting at the front table, proud, holding my little jam jar candle like a tiny usher of grief.
Then she read the line.
"And she still has my ladder."
I barked. One syllable, loud, unmistakable, a seal greeting a fish. Because here is the thing: I have a ladder in my garage that says SONIA on the side rail in permanent marker, and I have had it for two years, and it is a running joke between us, or I believed it was, the way I would text her a photo of it at Christmas like a hostage proof of life. My brain heard "ladder," connected it to the joke... and fired off a laugh before the rest of me could check the room.
The room... Forty people turned in the dark. Forty small candle flames swiveling toward me like a jury. Someone's chair creaked. The man who rhymed whiskey with risky made a small sound of disgust, which, from him, felt like a career low.
And Sonia stopped reading and looked at me, and that is when I understood, in the worst possible venue, at the worst possible speed, what the poem had been doing. The inventory had changed direction three lines earlier and I had been too busy being proud of her to listen. It was no longer a list of what her mother left. It was a list of what got left with the wrong people during the dying. The ladder was not our joke.
The ladder was the last thing I borrowed before the diagnosis, back when I still came over, and the line after it, which she read into my open staring face, was:
"Some things I lent out came back. Some people I lent out did not."
The poem was about me.
It had been about me for three lines, and it was about me for six more, and I had heckled it.
The worst part of laughing at the wrong moment is that the whole room finds out, all at once, exactly how well you were not listening.
She finished it. That is the thing about Sonia that I could put on her tombstone a hundred years from now: she finished it, voice level, hands steady now, as if my laugh had used up all the shaking in the room. The applause was long and pointed, and some of it was aimed at me the way applause can be a wall.
I found her outside afterward by the bins, because dramatic reconciliations in my life always seem to happen near bins. I started with "I'm so sorry," and she said, "For the laugh?" and I said yes, and she said, "The laugh I'll forgive tonight... The eleven months are going to take longer." Which is the most honest sentence anyone has ever said to me, and I have replayed it more than any poem.
We did the work. I want to skip past this part because it does not make good comedy, but it was the actual point, so: we did the work. I drove over on the weekends that used to become other weekends. I returned the ladder, which we both agreed felt weirdly ceremonial, like repatriating a museum piece.
I read what I could find about being on the wrong side of someone's grief, and I learned that the poets are unanimous on one point, which is that showing up late is still a form of showing up, provided you keep doing it. And when I finally worked up the nerve to ask if I could read Inventory again, slowly, on paper this time, she printed it and handed it over with one line underlined in pencil. Not the ladder line. The lending line. Underneath she had written: "Read it as many times as it takes."
It took a lot of times.
Here is the epilogue nobody at The Cellar Door would believe. Two years on, I write now too. Badly... then less badly. It started as penance, honestly, an attempt to understand what it costs to stand next to a candle and hand a room the worst year of your life, and it turned into the thing I do at six in the morning before anyone can stop me. Last spring I read at the Cellar Door myself, fourth on the list, next to the same fat candle. My poem was about forgiveness, specifically about how long it takes and who gets to set the clock, and there was a line in it about a ladder with a name on the side rail.
Sonia sat at the front table. When the ladder line came, she laughed. One syllable, loud, a seal greeting a fish, forty candles swiveling toward her in the dark.
She did it on purpose.
She held my eyes while she did it.
Fair is fair.
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.