We Wrote Each Other Into Poems We Never Shared
Two notebooks, one love story, zero readers.
I found out Kabir had been writing about me for nine years on the same afternoon I helped him pack for his wedding. The notebook was wedged between a chess set and a rice cooker manual, and it opened, because the universe has a sense of humor, to a poem about my laugh.
Let me back up.
Kabir and I met in the second week of college, in a queue for a photocopier that was out of toner. He was holding a paperback of Neruda with the cover torn off, and I said something insufferable about how sad poems attract sad boys, and he said, "This one's a happy poem, actually. You'd hate it." We were inseparable by October.
Not together. Never together.
Inseparable, which is a different country with worse weather.
For nine years we were the call after the bad date. The plus one at the cousin's wedding. The person who knows you take your tea half sugar and your bad news all at once. Twice a year, someone at a party would ask how long we'd been a couple, and we would perform our little routine, no no, we're just, it's not, and everyone would nod like they believed us, and the night would go on, slightly dented.
What nobody at those parties knew, what Kabir himself did not know, was that I went home from every one of those nights and wrote him down.
I had a notebook with a green cover, kept between the mattress and the headboard like contraband, and it was full of him. The way he tapped his chest twice when something moved him. The night bus, his shoulder, my traitor heart. I never once called the poems what they were. I titled them things like "Friend" and "October" and let the line breaks do the confessing.
I told myself it was practice. Every poet needs a subject, and he was simply the person standing closest when I looked up. I told myself a lot of things across those nine years, and I wrote all of them down too, and even my lies had his handwriting somewhere in the margins.
Then he met Sana, who is, and I say this with my whole ruined heart, wonderful. She laughs like a person who has never once checked whether laughing is allowed. They were engaged within a year. And because I am his best friend, which is the medal they give you for cowardice in this particular war, I was there on a Saturday in June with newspaper and packing tape, wrapping his kitchen in bundles while he decided which books deserved to move house.
He was in the bedroom taking apart a shelf when the notebook fell out of the stack I was boxing. Plain black cover, soft at the corners, the elastic snapped. Exactly like mine, is the thing. Wounded in the same places.
I opened it to see whose it was... That is the version of the story where I am innocent. The true version is that I knew whose it was the second I saw it, the way you know your own name across a loud room, and I opened it anyway.
The poem was called "Early." It was about a girl who laughs before the joke lands, because she has already seen where the sentence is going. It was about how being understood at that speed frightened him. Four lines from the bottom there was an image of a photocopier out of toner, and the whole room went quiet and small, and I sat down on the floor of my best friend's half-packed kitchen and read four more poems about myself with his fiancée's engagement invitations stacked eight inches from my knee.
Nine years. Two notebooks. The same secret, written twice, in two rooms across one city, by two people who told each other everything.
We were each other's most faithful subject and least brave audience.
I heard the shelf come apart in the bedroom, and his footsteps, and I did the bravest thing I had ever done up to that point in my life, which tells you everything. I closed the notebook and put it back in the box, spine down, under the chess set. When he came in, I was taping newspaper around a serving bowl, and my face must have been fine, because he said nothing except, "Tea break?" and I said, "Half sugar," and my voice held.
You want to know why I didn't say anything... So do I. I have run it a thousand ways since. He was getting married in three weeks, is the answer with the best posture.
But under it there is an uglier, truer one: for nine years, the poems were the only place the thing got to exist, and I had come to prefer it there. On the page, nobody ages, nobody chooses someone else, nobody ruins a friendship at a kitchen table. On the page, we were already together. Had been for years. Two notebooks with the same broken elastic, holding hands in the dark, doing all the living we were too careful to do.
The wedding was beautiful. I gave a toast. I got a laugh in the right places, and I did not cry until the drive home, at a red light, where a wedding is legally allowed to leave your body.
Here is where the story should end, and doesn't.
Two years later, a box arrived at my flat with Toronto customs stickers on it, because Kabir and Sana had moved for her work. Inside was the black notebook and an index card. The card said: "Found this while unpacking. It was always more yours than mine. P.S. I read the green one. Your bedside table, Diwali, 2019. I was waiting for you to say it first."
Diwali 2019. Three years before Sana.
Three years when a single sentence from either of us would have rerouted both our lives, and we sat on opposite sides of it, writing.
I did not sleep that night. I sat on my bed with both notebooks, his and mine, and read our whole unlived love story in the only edition it was ever printed in. It was good... That is the unbearable part. We wrote each other well. Anyone reading both notebooks side by side would say these two people knew each other down to the timber. Nobody will ever read them side by side. Print run of one. Audience of none.
I don't have a redemption for you, but I have this: I stopped keeping the notebook between the mattress and the headboard. Last spring, I typed up one of the old poems, the one called "October," and posted it on a community wall for poets, under my real name, where anyone could see it. My hands shook exactly the way they didn't for nine years. A stranger commented that it made her call someone she'd been quiet about. I sat with that for a long time. I still write about love, and lately about memory, which turns out to be love with the return address torn off. But I have a rule now, and I keep it the way other people keep religion: if a poem is about a living person who could still change my life, they hear it before the notebook does.
Kabir and I still talk. Less, and gently, the way you handle something mended. He is happy, I think... I hope. We have never once mentioned the index card.
The two notebooks live on my shelf now, side by side, spines touching.
It is the only version of us that ever got to live together, and I dust it every week.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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