I Sent the Wrong Poem to the Wrong Woman
Two drafts, two names, one catastrophic paste error.
At 1:14 in the morning I sent a love poem to my ex of two years and a closure poem to the woman I had been dating for three weeks, and then I put my phone face down on the nightstand and slept like a man with no enemies.
I want to be clear that I did this to myself. No app glitched. No network hiccuped. The disaster was handcrafted, artisanal, done entirely by my own thumbs in the blue glow of a phone screen in a dark room, which is where all of history's worst decisions are now made.
Here is how a man ends up with two poems and two women in two chat windows at one in the morning.
The first poem was for Sana. Three weeks of dating, the good kind of three weeks, where you laugh at things that are not funny and check your phone in elevators. At dinner that Friday she had leaned across the table and said, "You keep telling me you're a poet. Prove it. Write me something with my name in it." A commission. A deadline. I went home feeling like a man with a purpose and wrote the single worst poem of my adult life. I rhymed Sana with cabana. Then, because apparently I was not finished, with banana. There were eyes like oceans in it. There was a smile that lit up rooms. It was the poetry equivalent of a greeting card sold at a petrol station, and at midnight I genuinely believed it was charming.
The second poem existed because of a prompt I had found weeks earlier: write the letter you will never send. Every writer knows that prompt is a trapdoor. Mine dropped me straight into Ritika, two years gone, the ex I had stopped mentioning but not stopped drafting. The poem that came out was nothing like the banana one. It had her name in the first line and the last. It had the balcony in Pune and the argument about the dog we never got and the specific mercy of her leaving before either of us said the unforgivable thing.
It was not clever. It was true, which is worse.
It was never, under any circumstances, going to be sent. That was the entire point of it.
Both poems lived in my notes app, one above the other, like neighbors who should never have been introduced.
You can assemble the rest yourself. Two chat windows open, because I had been rereading old messages from Ritika like an archaeologist with no self-control. Copy. Switch. Paste. Send. Copy. Switch. Paste. Send. The little whoosh, twice, the most cheerful sound ever attached to a catastrophe. Sana received the poem with another woman's name in the first line and the last. Ritika, after two years of clean silence, received a poem rhyming Sana with banana.
I woke at nine to three notifications and the special stillness a bedroom has when your life has already changed and you have not been informed yet.
Ritika first, because the universe has comic timing: "This is beautiful. I am fairly sure it is not for me. Also, hi." Then, a minute later: "Did you rhyme someone's name with banana? Blink twice if you need help."
Then Sana. One message, four words, the four words...
"Who is Ritika?"
If you search for embarrassing message mistakes at nine in the morning with your heart in your throat, and I have, you will find people who texted their boss instead of their best friend, and people who replied all. None of the results cover my category, which is poems delivered to the wrong heart. There is no advice column for that. You just have to call.
So I called Sana and began explaining, at speed, the notes app, the prompt, the archaeology. She let me run out of air... then she said, "Stop. Read me the other one. The one I was supposed to get. Out loud."
Reading the banana poem aloud, sober, at 9:40 in the morning, to its intended recipient, remains the single most painful literary performance of my life. I heard myself say lit up every room she walked into and wanted to walk into the sea. When I finished... there was a silence long enough to hang laundry in.
"Okay," she said. "Now read me the one I actually got. Yours. Out loud."
I did. My voice did something embarrassing around the balcony and something worse around the dog. When I finished, the silence was different... softer at the edges.
"That one," Sana said. "That's the writer I want poems from. Not the cabana guy. If you ever send me the cabana guy again, we're done."
Honesty that arrives by accident is still honesty. It just shows up barefoot at one in the morning, without knocking.
I met Ritika for coffee that weekend, with Sana's knowledge, at the kind of neutral cafe where closure goes to be notarized. It lasted one hour. She had printed the poem, which shook me, and she slid it across the table with two lines underlined and said, "You should have sent this two years ago." I told her it did not exist two years ago, that it had taken this long to write, and she nodded like a doctor confirming a suspected diagnosis. We talked about forgiveness the way two people split a bill, carefully, both reaching, both a little relieved. At the door she hugged me for exactly as long as you hug a finished chapter, and said thank you for the poem she was never meant to read, and left, and it did not hurt.
That was the news I walked home with... it did not hurt.
Here is the part I keep turning over. The poem I wrote on purpose, for the woman I was trying to win, was fake. Not dishonest, exactly, just empty, a performance of a man writing a poem. The poem I wrote by accident of a prompt, for a woman I would never send it to, was the only true thing in the notes app. I had it exactly backwards, the way most of us do: performing for the present, honest only with the past.
The paste error did not create the problem.
It published it.
Sana and I are still together, a year and a half now. She made two rules. The first is that the banana poem lives on her fridge, held up by a magnet shaped like a pineapple, to keep me humble, and she recites it at parties with full dramatic commitment while I stare into my drink. The second rule is that every poem she gets from me must cost me something, because she read the difference that morning with her own ears and refuses to go back. Writing about love when the love is sitting across the table, reading your face while she reads your lines, turns out to be far more terrifying than writing to an ex. I recommend it anyway.
The notes app is empty now. Every poem starts in a paper notebook, in ink, where the only way to deliver it to the wrong woman is to hand it over myself, in person, looking her in the eye.
So far, my aim has been perfect.
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.