I Broke Up With Him in a Poem
I couldn't say it plainly, so I said it in stanzas.
The poem was fourteen lines long, and I read it to him in his mother's kitchen while the kettle screamed on the stove. He thought I was sharing new work.
I was leaving him.
We had been together three years, two months, and a number of days I refuse to count. Arjun was kind the way weather is kind: pleasant, steady, entirely without malice. He remembered my dentist appointments. He warmed my side of the bed in winter by lying on it first and then rolling over. When people asked how we were doing, I said good, and it wasn't a lie so much as a rounding error.
The truth was smaller and worse.
I had stopped writing.
Three years of poems about him at the start, then poems near him... then no poems at all. I would sit with my notebook open and feel like a parked car with the engine running. Nobody warns you that a person can be lovely and still be the reason you are going quiet.
For six weeks I rehearsed the plain sentence. I want to break up. I said it to the bathroom mirror while the tap ran. I said it to the steering wheel at red lights. I said it to my sister on the phone, and she sighed and said, then say it to him, not to me. But my mouth would not produce those five words in front of his face. Every time I tried, he would do something small and disarming, hand me the remote, pick an eyelash off my cheek, ask if I wanted the last samosa, and the sentence would dissolve like sugar in warm water.
My friend Meera told me to text him. "People do it all the time," she said, stabbing a straw into her iced coffee. "It's a mercy, honestly. Nobody wants an audience for that." But three years felt like it deserved more than a gray bubble on a screen. And I am, for better or worse, a person who writes things down when speech fails. I once resigned from a job by letter. I once apologized to my mother with a note slid under her door. I was twenty-six when I did that. I am not proud of it. I am telling you so you understand what kind of coward I am, which is the literary kind.
The poem started as an exercise. I had been circling writing prompts for weeks, trying to jumpstart the stalled engine, and one of them said: write the sentence you cannot say out loud, then keep going. I wrote, I want to break up. Then I kept going. At two in the morning on a Tuesday, cross-legged on my bed with a blue gel pen and a notebook whose elastic had snapped months earlier, I wrote fourteen lines that told the truth for the first time in a year.
It was not a cruel poem. It was about a coat. In the poem, love is a coat I put on when I was cold, and it fit, and it kept me warm, and then one spring I noticed I could not lift my arms in it. The last line was: I am not cold anymore, and the coat deserves a winter. I read it back and my hands were shaking. It was the only honest thing I had written in a year, and it was going to end my relationship, and both of those facts felt like the same fact.
I chose a Sunday. His mother goes to nine o'clock Mass, and he makes tea in her kitchen out of habit while he waits to drive her to lunch after. I loved that kitchen. Fridge magnets from Goa and Niagara Falls. A calendar with the saints' days circled in red. I stood by the fridge with the folded page in my hand and said, "I wrote something. Can I read it to you?"
He smiled. He always loved being read to. He set down two mugs, leaned against the counter, and the kettle began its slow climb behind him.
I read.
I watched him understand it. I watched the exact line where he understood it, line five, the one about the arms. Something in his face went carefully still, the way you go still when a wasp lands on your wrist. The kettle reached its boil and screamed... He did not move to take it off. I finished the poem to the sound of it.
"Read it again," he said.
So I read it again, over the shriek of the kettle, until he finally reached back and turned off the flame without looking at it, and the kitchen went so quiet I could hear the fridge hum.
Then he did something I did not expect. He nodded slowly, like an editor. "It's good," he said. "The third stanza sags a little. But the ending is strong. You should send it somewhere."
For one insane moment I thought he had missed it entirely... That I would have to say the plain sentence after all, right there over the cooling mugs, while he offered craft notes on my breakup poem like a workshop partner. "Arjun," I said. "It isn't a draft. It's a door."
"I know what it is," he said. He was looking at the window, not at me. "I knew at line two. I just wanted to hear it one more time in your voice."
A poem can open the door for you. You still have to walk through it on your own two legs.
We talked for an hour, the way you talk when the verdict is already in and all that is left is the reading of it. He asked if there was someone else. There wasn't. He asked when I had stopped being happy, and I told him the truth, which is that I had not stopped being happy... I had stopped being anything, and that this was worse and had nothing to do with how good he was.
He washed both mugs even though only his had tea in it. He walked me to my car in his socks. The last thing he said was, "Leave the poem. It's mine too." I went back inside and left it on the counter, folded in thirds, under the magnet from Goa.
Here is what nobody tells you about ending things in writing: the writing does not do the ending. I still had to stand in that kitchen with my knees shaking. I still had to watch his face at line five. What the poem did was smaller and stranger.
It told me first.
For six weeks I had been trying to say a sentence I was not sure of, and then one night I wrote fourteen lines and there was no more doubt in me, only logistics. Some people find out what they feel by talking. I find out on paper, and I have stopped apologizing for it.
Six months later I typed the poem up and entered it into a monthly poetry contest under the title "The Coat." It did not win. It did not need to. Sending it out felt like signing papers for a divorce that never legally existed. Since then I have filled two notebooks, and I notice that when I write about love now, the poems are mostly about beginnings, which is its own quiet miracle, because for three years I could not write about anything at all.
Arjun texted me once, about a year later. A photo of his mother's fridge. The poem was still there, gone soft and furred at the folds, held up by Goa. "She thinks it's about an actual coat," he wrote. "She says you should dress warmer." I laughed until I cried, standing in the cereal aisle of a supermarket, and a stranger asked if I was okay, and I said yes, which for once was completely true.
I still can't hear a kettle reach its boil without waiting... for one extra second, for someone to turn it off.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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