Ten Years of Poems, All About Leaving
I reread my archive and found one long rehearsal for goodbye.
My laptop was dying, so I spent a Sunday moving ten years of poems onto a hard drive, and by evening I had discovered something a stranger would have spotted in ten minutes: every single one of them is about leaving. Three hundred and eleven files, one subject, and I had somehow never noticed, the way you never notice your own accent.
I want to be clear about the scale of it. Not a theme. An infestation. The love poems end at departure gates. The poems about my city are about the last local train out of it. There is a poem about my grandmother's kitchen that manages, in fourteen lines, to walk out of the kitchen. I wrote a poem about a banyan tree once, an actual tree, rooted by definition, and I gave it migrating birds and made the birds the point. October 2019 apparently produced a poem in which a teacup leaves a saucer. A teacup.
I sat on my bed with the laptop hot on my knees and did the arithmetic every writer both wants and dreads, and the total was this: I had spent a decade writing exits. Beautiful ones, some of them. A couple even placed in contests. Ten years of doors closing gorgeously, suitcases packed with excellent line breaks, taillights described with real tenderness.
Here is the joke, and I promise you the joke is the whole story.
I have never left anything in my life.
I live four kilometres from the hospital I was born in. I have had one employer, one city, one pin code as an adult. I married Nisha, whom I met in the eleventh standard, and on our wedding day her uncle joked that I was the only man in India marrying his school crush out of pure administrative continuity. I have a mug I have used since college. It has a crack. I have researched glue for it. The man who wrote three hundred and eleven poems about walking away has, in observable fact, never once walked away from so much as a bad restaurant before the food arrived.
For a few weeks I carried this around as a private joke about myself. The stay-at-home poet of departures. I even started drafting a funny piece about it, because humour is where I put things while I decide whether to feel them.
The funny piece would not come.
Something in it kept snagging, the way a sweater catches on a nail you cannot find.
What dislodged it, in the end, was a prompt I had assigned myself from a list, the kind of exercise you do when the well is low. The prompt was five words: write about a door, staying. Simple. Wholesome, even. I sat down to write about a door that stays shut, a house that keeps its people, something warm for once.
What came out was a boy standing at a window.
I did not plan him. He arrived the way the true thing always arrives in a draft, sideways, wearing the costume of an image.
A boy at a window, evening, watching a scooter go down a lane, and the sound of it fading in stages: loud, less, less... gone.
And the boy in the poem does something I had written, I realised with an actual chill, dozens of times in ten years without once seeing it.
He does not cry, and he does not call out. He memorises.
The angle of the light. The exact pitch of the engine. The blue of the shirt. He stands there gathering evidence, as if the leaving were a crime scene and he the only detective who would ever be assigned to it.
My father left on a scooter, on an evening in June, when I was nine.
He said he was getting cigarettes, which is such a cliche that for years I was embarrassed to tell people, as if my own childhood had plagiarised a bad film. He moved to another city and became, over the years, a voice on occasional phone calls, then a rumour... then a photograph my mother did not take down but stopped dusting.
I had, I would have told you, dealt with this. I am forty one. There has been therapy. There have been the long adult conversations in which my mother and I traded our two halves of that June evening. When people asked whether the father thing showed up in my writing, I would say, and I believed it... no, actually, I never write about him. I write about other things. Travel. Trains. Distances.
Three hundred and eleven poems about leaving, and I thought the man who left was not in them because he was not mentioned.
That Sunday archive was not a body of work. It was surveillance footage.
Every departure I ever staged on paper, the gates, the trains, the taillights, the teacup, was the same scooter going down the same lane, redrawn in whatever costume that year's vocabulary could afford. I was not imagining exits. I was replaying one, from the inside, over and over, the way you rub a coin smooth. Some part of me had decided, in June of my ninth year, that the only way to survive being left was to understand leaving so completely, from the leaver's side, that it could never ambush me again. So I practised... For ten years I sat in the driver's seat of every poem and drove away from a boy I refused to look at in the mirror.
For ten years I thought I was writing exits. I was writing one door, from the inside, waiting for a man to walk back through it.
And here is the part that costs me something to say.
The rehearsal was not harmless. You do not spend a decade practising departure without your hand learning the motion. Nisha read some of the archive that month, at my asking, and she was quiet for a long time, and then she said the sentence I expect to be thinking about on my deathbed: “In ten years of poems, no one ever stays. Where am I in these?” She was not accusing me. It was worse. She was locating herself, like a woman checking a map of the house she lives in and finding her room missing.
I had been so busy guarding the door that I never once wrote the people on my side of it. My whole actual life, the crack-mugged, four-kilometre, administratively continuous, quietly happy life I chose every single day, was undocumented. I kept the records of a catastrophe that had already happened and none at all of the miracle in progress.
I am trying to correct the ledger. It goes slowly. Staying, it turns out, is technically harder to write than leaving: no engine sound, no taillights, nothing conveniently fading. Just a woman doing a crossword with her feet in your lap, decades of it, dramatic as rain on a lake. I have been reading through everything gathered under memory on a poetry site I like, studying how other writers hold still on the page, the way I once studied exits.
Last month I finally wrote about the scooter directly. No costume, no teacup. A poem about a man my age now older than his father was that June, which is its own strange vertigo, and about forgiveness, not the greeting card kind, but the specific technical act of letting a nine-year-old off duty. It is not the best thing I have written. It is the first thing I have written facing the right direction.
It ends at the window, of course. Same boy, same lane, same fading engine.
But this time the poem does not follow the scooter.
It stays in the room with the boy, and it turns on the light, and behind him, where ten years of poems never once thought to look, there is a whole house.
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.