The Poem I Couldn't Finish Until She Left
Endings, it turns out, have to be lived before they can be written.
For three years I carried an unfinished poem the way other people carry a photograph in a wallet: worn soft at the folds, looked at too often, never shown to anyone. It had eighteen drafts and no last stanza.
Then Mara left on a Tuesday in March, and the last stanza took nine minutes.
The poem started before she did, technically. I found it through a prompt at a Thursday night workshop in the back of a community center that smelled like floor polish and burnt coffee: write about a door you never opened. I wrote about the green door of my childhood house, then crossed it out and wrote about a woman I had just met, a woman who laughed at her own jokes a half second before the punchline, as if she could not wait for you to catch up. That was Mara. We had known each other eleven days. The poem was four stanzas long and I could not, for the life of me, write the fourth.
I want to explain what an unfinished poem does to a person, because non-writers think it just sits there. It does not sit there. It rides along. It clears its throat during quiet dinners. It wakes you at 3 a.m. with a candidate line that dissolves by morning like a fish going under. I tried to finish it on trains, in waiting rooms, once in the middle of her birthday party, standing by the coat pile with a pen and a napkin while twenty feet away she told the joke about her uncle and the rowboat. Every ending I tried went one of two ways: sentimental, which is lying with sugar, or clever, which is lying with a smirk. The poem refused both. Poems are honest the way dogs are loyal, without effort and without exception, and mine simply would not eat what I was feeding it.
Mara knew about the poem. Of course she knew. Early on she thought it was romantic, this thing I was building about her, for her, adjacent to her. "Did you finish it yet?" she would ask, and it became our running joke... and then, slowly, over the third year, it stopped being funny, and I did not notice the exact month that happened, which tells you everything about the third year.
"Did you finish it yet?" she asked that last winter, and there was something new under her voice, a floor joist creaking beneath the joke.
"Almost," I said.
I was not almost.
She left in March. There was no villain in it, which is the hardest kind. Nobody cheated, nobody screamed. She stood at the window of our apartment with the rain coming down the glass, just her silhouette against the gray light, and she said, "You know what I think? I think you can't finish it because you'd have to be honest about us to do it."
She said it kindly. That was the worst part.
Then she took the suitcase that had been sitting by the door for two days, the suitcase I had walked past twenty times without letting myself see... and she went to her sister's, and the apartment got very good at being quiet.
People talk about writing through a breakup as if the writing is a rope bridge you build ahead of yourself, plank by plank, over the canyon. For me it was not like that. For six weeks I wrote nothing. I ate cereal at strange hours. I slept on my half of the bed out of habit, then in the middle out of spite, then on the couch because the bed had opinions. I read old drafts of the poem the way you reread text messages after a funeral, looking for the exact sentence where everything was still fine.
And that is when I saw it.
Draft seven, dated two full years earlier, had a line crossed out so hard the pen had torn the paper. I held the page up to the lamp to read the ghost of it through the scribble. The line said: "She is the door, and I am the man in the hallway, still deciding."
Two years. I had known for two years and crossed it out.
The poem knew before I did. Every honest draft is a letter from the person you have not yet agreed to become.
The last stanza came on a night in late April, around 4 a.m., rain on the window again like the weather has no imagination. I was not trying to write. I was standing where she had stood, my own silhouette in the glass now, holding a mug of tea gone cold, and the lines arrived whole, the way they almost never do, and I wrote them on the back of an electric bill with a pencil that needed sharpening.
Nine minutes.
I did not change a word afterward, not one, and I have changed every word I have ever written. The stanza was about the man in the hallway. It said he stood there so long the door became a wall. It said no one did that to him. It said he did it with his own stillness, and that stillness, left long enough, is a decision wearing patience as a costume.
It was the truest thing I had ever written, and she was the only person who would fully understand it, and I could never show it to her. That is the particular tax on writing through a breakup: the finished poem is a letter to someone who has rightly stopped reading your mail.
So I did the other thing. I read it out loud, alone, at the window, feeling ridiculous... and then less ridiculous. Some weeks later I read it at the Thursday workshop, same burnt coffee, same floor polish, and my voice held until the second to last line. A man twice my age came up after, gripped my shoulder, and said, "Hallway. Yeah." Just that. Grief between men often arrives in freight shorthand, but it arrives. Later I sent it out into the world properly, into a monthly poetry contest, because a poem that cost that much should get to leave the house. It did not win... I genuinely did not mind, which is how I knew something in me had shifted its weight.
I will not pretend the poem healed me, because healing is slower and stupider than that, made mostly of grocery runs and returned library books and the first morning you wake up and your chest is just a chest. But finishing it changed what the loneliness was made of. Before, the ache was a question mark. After, it was a period. You can build on a period.
Mara is fine, by the way. Better than fine, from the little I hear, and I mean it when I say good. She spent three years asking me one question, and it was never really about the poem.
The poem is framed nowhere. It lives in a folder with eighteen dead drafts on top of it like sediment, and the finished thing at the bottom, printed clean. Sometimes on rainy nights I stand at the window anyway, out of habit, or homage.
The glass shows a man, a room, a lamp.
No hallway. No door. Just weather, doing its honest work, and me, finally, doing mine.
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.