We Wrote a Poem Together, One Line a Day
A hundred days, two handwritings, and a friendship in couplets.
The rules were written on the inside cover in Ritu's handwriting, because Ritu is the kind of person who brings a constitution to a picnic. One line a day. Alternate days, alternate pens: she was blue, I was black. No skipping, no editing the other person's line, no discussing the poem out loud. Ever. One hundred days.
"Why a hundred?" I asked.
"Because ninety-nine sounds like we gave up," she said.
We had been friends for eleven years and flatmates for three, which is long enough to know someone's tea order, their crying schedule, and the exact sound of their key giving up on our stubborn lock. The notebook idea came out of a boring Sunday and a writing prompt one of us had saved on a phone, one of those prompts that sounds like nothing until it detonates: "Write something you can only finish with help."
So we bought a fat red diary from the stationery shop under our building, the kind with a ribbon bookmark and delusions of importance, and we started.
Day 1, blue ink: "This building has seven floors and none of them are quiet."
Day 2, black ink, me, after forty minutes of terror on my bed with the pen cap in my mouth: "The noise is how the building says everyone is still alive."
Day 3, blue: "Alive is a group project."
I read that line standing in the kitchen at 7 a.m. and grinned like an idiot at a diary.
That was the moment I understood what we had actually built.
Not a poem. A tennis court.
The logistics became sacred very fast. The diary lived on whoever's bed had the next turn, and finding it on your pillow at night felt like being handed a baton in a relay race run entirely in pyjamas. Some nights I wrote my line in four minutes. Some nights I lay there till 1 a.m., pen hovering... because her line from the morning was so good that following it felt like singing after a professional. She swears she felt the same about mine. We are both lying and both correct.
We learned things. I learned Ritu is funnier on paper than in person, and she is very funny in person. Day 22, blue: "My boss speaks fluent meeting." I learned that I am braver in black ink than in conversation. Day 31, I wrote about my brother, whom I do not discuss, one line, eleven words. She never brought it up out loud, per the constitution. Day 32, blue ink, said only: "Some doors open one centimetre a year, and that is still opening."
No skipping meant no skipping. She wrote a line at 11:58 p.m. from a wedding in Jaipur and photographed it on a napkin, then taped the napkin in when she got home, because the constitution had no clause against napkins. I wrote a line with a fever of 102, and it shows: even my handwriting looks unwell. The poem absorbed everything. Office politics, a dying money plant, the monsoon arriving like a relative with luggage. It was the world's slowest newspaper, circulation two.
Day 61
Then we had the fight.
It was about the flat, technically. Her boyfriend was around five nights out of seven, my dishes had opinions, somebody said "you always" and somebody said "you never," the two phrases that should be banned from every home in the world. It was the kind of fight where the topic is small and the volume is eleven years deep. She slept with her door shut. I slept with my headphones in. The next morning we moved through the kitchen like rival ghosts.
We did not speak for nineteen days.
Here is the thing I will be explaining to people for the rest of my life...
The poem never stopped.
Day 61, her turn, blue ink, on my pillow by nightfall as always: "Even a slammed door is a kind of address."
Day 62, black: "I still know which floorboard you avoid, and I avoid it for you."
Day 63, blue: "The kettle boils for two out of habit."
Not speaking, we said everything.
The constitution held when we could not: no editing the other person's line, no discussing the poem out loud. We fought nowhere and made up in couplets, one centimetre a day, two stubborn handwritings negotiating a peace treaty neither mouth was ready to sign. Day 74, I wrote, "Sorry is a small word wearing its best clothes," and heard her laugh through the wall, one short honk, quickly suppressed. Day 75, blue ink, the line I will have read at my funeral... "Come and have dinner, the poem is getting cold."
We spoke that night. We ordered biryani and argued about whose line broke the silence first, which was a much better fight than the original.
We stopped speaking for nineteen days, and the poem never noticed, because the poem knew something we had forgotten: it was still our turn.
The last twenty-five days were pure joy, and joy is harder to write than grief, ask anyone. We got ambitious. We rhymed on purpose. We planted a callback on day 88 to a line from day 9 and were insufferably pleased with ourselves. On day 97 her boyfriend asked what was in the red diary and we answered in unison, without planning it, "paperwork," and that is when he knew he would never fully have her, and to his credit he made peace with it.
Day 100 fell on a Sunday. We wrote the last line together, one word each, alternating, which violated the constitution, but the constitution had served its term. Then Ritu, constitution-bringer, list-maker, said the most un-Ritu thing I have ever heard: "I think other people should see this."
So we typed it up, all hundred days of it, napkin included as a footnote, and posted it on a community wall for poets, both names, both inks noted in the description. Strangers read our hundred mornings. One comment said, "I called my old flatmate after reading this." We printed that comment. It lives inside the red diary's back cover, which felt like the poem getting a reply.
People ask what the poem is about, and the honest answer is: about a hundred days long. It is about noise and kettles and a money plant that survived against medical advice. But underneath, every single line is about hope, the domestic kind, the kind that shows up in blue ink on your worst evening and says the building is loud because everyone is still alive.
Ritu moved out last year. Married the boyfriend; the dishes and I attended. On her last night in the flat, I found the red diary on my pillow one final time. She had started a new page. Day 101, blue ink: "Rule one of the new constitution: distance counts as a line break, not an ending."
There is a second diary now. Green, because we retired our old colors with full honors. It travels between her new flat and mine by whoever visits, and the rules are looser, and the handwriting is the same two kinds of rain it always was.
We are on day 46... It is my turn tonight.
The pen cap is already in my mouth.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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