I Burned the Poems and Kept the Ashes
A jar on my shelf holds everything I ever felt for him.
The jar on my bookshelf used to hold mango pickle. Now it holds every poem I wrote for a man between 2016 and 2021, reduced to about four tablespoons of grey ash and one stubborn corner of paper that refused to burn.
Guests ask about it sometimes. I tell them it is sand from a beach trip. Nobody has ever questioned this, even though the jar is clearly labeled, in my own handwriting on masking tape, with a date and nothing else: 14 February. I have a certain sense of ceremony. I never claimed to have a subtle one.
Here is what was in the jar before it was ash: three notebooks and forty-one loose pages. Five years of a love that was real, I want to be clear about that. He was not a villain. He was a man who liked my poems more than he liked me, which took me an embarrassingly long time to understand, because when someone memorizes your stanzas you assume they have memorized you.
He left in the ordinary way. A conversation at a kitchen table, both of us polite, the tea going cold in a way that felt scripted. Within a year he was engaged to someone who, by every account, is lovely. I checked the accounts. Repeatedly... At two in the morning. You know how it goes.
The notebooks stayed.
They stayed through two apartment moves. I packed them in a carton marked KITCHEN so I would not have to explain them to the friends helping me shift. They stayed through a perfectly good relationship that ended partly because one night the new man found a loose page in my copy of a cookbook and read four lines aloud in a gentle voice and asked, "Who is this about?" and I said, "Nobody," and we both heard how much of a somebody Nobody was.
My friend Sana, who has known me since we both wore the same school uniform, finally staged an intervention over biryani. "Throw them away," she said.
"I can't put them in the garbage," I said. "They'll be under vegetable peels. It's disrespectful."
"To him?"
"To the poems."
She put down her spoon and looked at me the way you look at a friend who has just told you the actual truth by accident. Because that was it... wasn't it. I had stopped grieving the man years ago. I was holding a five-year archive of my own best work, and every line of it was addressed to a reader who had unsubscribed.
The Burning
I chose the fourteenth of February because I am, as established, not subtle, and because the date needed to be taken back from its previous owner. I took the notebooks up to the terrace of my building at ten at night with a steel bucket, a box of matches, a candle in case the matches lost courage in the wind, and, because I am my mother's daughter, a small jug of water for safety.
I want to tell you it was cinematic. It was not.
Paper in a bucket does not catch the way it does in films. It smolders... goes out... sulks. The wind kept auditioning for a role in the story and blowing out the candle. At one point my upstairs neighbor, an elderly gentleman walking off his dinner, appeared out of the dark, looked into my bucket of half-burnt stanzas, and said, "Beta, you cannot make barbecue with paper. You need charcoal." I said thank you, uncle. He nodded gravely and walked on, and I stood there laughing alone on a terrace on Valentine's night, which I believe is what healing actually looks like.
Not a montage. A woman with a bucket, laughing at nothing her ex will ever know about.
I read each poem once before it went in. That was the rule I had set myself, and it was the hardest part, because reading them I finally saw what I had never seen while writing them.
The poems were careful. Five years of love and not one dangerous line.
I had written him poem after poem designed not to startle him, praise polished until it was frictionless, longing filed down to fit inside what he could comfortably receive. Months later I read an essay on why safe poems lose, and I had to put my phone down and stare at a wall, because I had run that experiment for half a decade with my own heart as the funding.
He was never my reader. He was my constraint.
Burning them was not destroying the love. It was admitting the love was finished being written.
Forty-three pieces of paper went into the bucket. Forty-two burned.
The one that survived, scorched along its edge like a prop from a treasure hunt, was the only poem in the whole archive that was not about him. I had written it in his hospital waiting room during his father's bypass surgery, and it was about my own hands, how strange they looked holding a stranger's get-well flowers, how I could not remember the last thing I had made with them just for myself. It was the only honest poem in three notebooks, and the fire, which has better editorial judgment than I do, sent it back.
I kept it. This spring I typed it out and posted it on a community wall for poets, where strangers who owe me nothing said it made them look at their own hands. One woman wrote that she had a box like my notebooks, and that she was going to buy matches. I told her to also buy a candle. The wind out there is not on your side.
And the ashes went into the pickle jar, because when the burning was done I found I could not simply tip five years over a terrace railing into the parking lot. That felt like littering with my own history. So I swept them up with a piece of cardboard, carried them downstairs, and gave them a shelf.
People assume the jar is a shrine. It is the opposite of a shrine. A shrine says: this is still holy, keep kneeling. The jar says: this happened, it weighed something, and this is exactly how much. Four tablespoons. I find the honesty of that measurement comforting in a way I cannot fully explain. Grief always claims to be an ocean. Sometimes you burn it down and discover it fits in a container that used to hold pickle.
In March I took one pinch of the ash, just one, and stirred it into the soil of the basil plant on my kitchen windowsill. Not for symbolism, or fine, yes, entirely for symbolism, but also because I had read that ash is good for soil, and I liked the idea of those careful, frightened poems finally being useful, finally feeding something that would grow without asking anyone's permission.
These days I am writing again, and the new poems frighten me a little, which I have come to understand is the correct amount. When I finish one, I read it and ask a single question, the question I never asked in those five years: would this line survive a fire? Some do... Most do not. I keep only the ones that do, and I have started writing my way toward the new beginnings I spent years believing required someone else's signature.
The basil, for the record, is thriving. I cook with it. He is delicious.
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.