The Last Line Took Me Three Years
The poem about her ended only when I finally did.
The poem had thirty-one lines for three years because I could not write the thirty-second. Everything about her fit on one page except the ending.
I started it the night Nadia left, which sounds romantic and was not. She took two suitcases and the good umbrella, and her tea went cold on the windowsill while she waited for the cab, and after the front door clicked I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote thirty-one lines in about forty minutes, blue ink, in a notebook I had bought from a railway station stall for forty rupees. Then I reached the bottom of the page and stopped, the way you stop at the edge of a platform when the train has already gone.
I told myself I would finish it in the morning.
The morning took three years.
Everyone tells you that writing about heartbreak is therapy. Press the wound to the page, they say, and the page will take some of it. Nobody warns you about the other thing a poem can do, which is become a room you keep a person in. As long as those lines stayed unfinished, some small clause of the story stayed open. Somewhere in the white space under line thirty-one, she had not entirely left.
The first year I auditioned angry endings. You were the fire and I was the house. I crossed that one out because it was a lie; nothing burned, nothing even raised its voice. We ended the way a lease ends. I tried crueler lines and pettier lines, and one about the umbrella that I am still a little proud of, and none of them fit, because the poem was not angry. Only I was, and only on Tuesdays.
The second year I auditioned wise endings. Lines about seasons. Lines about rivers letting go of their banks. One draft actually ended with the word acceptance, which should be illegal in a poem. I crossed them all out because a last line should not sound like a fridge magnet, and every wise thing I wrote sounded like it came free with a scented candle.
My friend Dev asked about the poem at a bar in the third year. He is the only person who knew it existed. "Read it to me," he said.
"It's not finished."
"You said that last Diwali."
"It's a long poem."
"It's one page. I've seen the notebook. You guard it like a passport."
I gave him my speech about endings, how the right line has to close the door and leave a window open, how I would know it when I heard it. He let me finish, wiped the foam off his lip, and said, very quietly, "Maybe the poem is done and you're not."
I ordered another beer instead of answering him, which was its own kind of answer.
Here is the embarrassing part. I carried that notebook everywhere. To weddings. To a job interview. Once to a dentist appointment, as if the last line might arrive mid-filling and I would need to catch it before the anesthesia wore off. The pages went soft at the corners. The blue ink faded to something closer to grey. A poem is supposed to hold a moment still, but mine was aging right along with me, and neither of us was finishing.
Around that time I read an essay about why safe poems lose, about how the pieces that stay with a reader are the ones that cost the writer something at the door. I recognized myself immediately, the way you recognize your own cough in a quiet theater. Every ending I had auditioned was safe. Anger is safe; it keeps the other person guilty. Wisdom is safe; it keeps you hovering above the wreckage in a nice coat. For three years I had been writing around the love itself. Thirty-one careful lines of around.
The last line finally arrived on a Tuesday in October, in a laundromat, which is the least poetic sentence I have ever typed.
I was folding towels. A woman two machines down opened a bottle of detergent, lemon and something powdery underneath, the exact brand Nadia used, and the smell went through me like a hand through water.
I did not cry... I stood there holding a towel folded into a sad triangle and heard the line, whole, in her voice and mine at once.
It was not thunder... it was more like remembering where you left your keys.
She took her mug when she left. I still warm two cups when the kettle sings.
That was it.
That was the thirty-second line, and it had been sitting in my kitchen the entire time, every single morning, while I searched for it in metaphors about rivers.
An unfinished poem is a way of keeping someone in the room long after they have stopped answering the door.
I wrote the line on the back of a detergent receipt because the notebook was at home. Then I sat in a plastic chair while my towels went around and around, and felt something I had no name for, lighter than grief and heavier than relief.
The poem was done.
Which meant it was over... which meant it had been over for three years and I was the last person to be notified.
Dev made me do something with it. His argument was that a poem finished in secret is just a longer secret. So I typed it up and entered it into a monthly poetry contest, thirty-two lines, three years, one lemon-scented laundromat. It did not win... it did not place. I checked the results twice to be sure of the nowhere, then laughed at myself alone in the kitchen, because apparently some part of me had expected the universe to pay me back with a certificate.
But I also posted it where people could actually find it, on a community wall for poets, mostly so the poem would stop being mine alone. A week later a stranger left a comment underneath. Not a long one. It said: the last line ruined me, how long did it take you? I typed the honest answer... three years. She replied with two words: worth it.
I understand now what the poem was doing all that time. It was not waiting for a better line. It was waiting for me to stop guarding the door. There is a reason I could suddenly write about healing that October and not one day earlier. The last line of a poem about someone is the first line of your life without them, and you cannot write it until you are willing to live it.
Last month I bought a new mug. Plain white, no chip, no history. I set it on the shelf where hers used to sit, and the cupboard door closed all the way for the first time, and I stood in my kitchen listening to nothing at all.
It sounded like a last line.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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