The Poem My Neighbour Slipped Under My Door
We'd never spoken. The poem introduced us.
I had lived in the flat for six months and I had never spoken to the neighbour across the hall. We had passed each other on the stairs a dozen times, the nod, the half-smile, the way you acknowledge a person without having to talk to them.
Then the poem came under the door.
It was a single sheet of paper, typed, a poem about the way the light came through the stairwell window in the evening, the way the stairs sounded when someone came home late, the way the building held the sound of a hundred lives happening at once.
I read it twice. I stood in the hallway and I read it twice, and I understood that the poem was not just about the building. It was a letter. It was the neighbour saying 'I have been listening to your footsteps for six months, and this is what I have noticed, and I wanted you to know that someone was paying attention'.
I wrote a poem back. I slipped it under her door, the way she had slipped hers under mine. I don't know if she read it or kept it or threw it away. But the next time we passed on the stairs we said hello, and the hello was the thing the poem had built.
We are friends now. Not close friends, but the kind of friends who know each other's footsteps. The poem is in a frame on her wall. Mine is in a drawer. The poems are the bridge between two strangers who will never be more than neighbours but will always be more than strangers.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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