Chapter 13

The poems had always been private.

That was the rule — the one rule Lookmhee had kept consistently since she was fifteen and had first started writing them in the back of her school notebooks, tucked between history notes and math problems she had never fully understood. They were not for sharing. They were not for reading aloud. They were not for anyone else’s eyes, not her mother’s, not her sister’s, not the friends she had trusted with most other things.

The poems were just hers. The place where she put things that were too big or too complicated or too tender to exist anywhere else. The overflow valve. The pressure release.

She had filled four notebooks since moving to the city.

She was aware that this was more than she had written in the previous two years combined. She was choosing not to examine that fact too closely.

The current notebook — the fifth one, a dark green one she had bought from the bookstore’s small stationery section three weeks ago — was already a third full. She sat with it on Sunday morning, cross-legged on her bed, the window light coming in grey and soft, a cup of tea going cold on the floor beside her in the way that all her cups of tea went cold because she always forgot them, and she read back through what she had written over the last few weeks.

It was, she thought, extremely obvious.

Not in the way she wrote about places or seasons or the particular quality of morning light on rooftops — those poems were about things, and things could be kept general, could be about everywhere and nowhere at once. These were about a person. Unmistakably, unavoidably about a person. The precision of someone’s hands. The specific quality of a voice that said things like facts. A hand taken in a lobby that smelled like floor polish and the faint hum of overhead lights. Coffee left without a note. Music through a wall at one in the morning.

She closed the notebook.

She looked at the wall between her apartment and 4C.

Then she opened the notebook again and wrote three more lines because apparently she had no self-control whatsoever.

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It was Dao who noticed first.

Not that she knew what she was noticing — Dao was perceptive about books and customers and the particular needs of her store, not about the private emotional lives of her employees. But she had a way of observing things accurately without necessarily understanding their full context.

It was a Tuesday. Lookmhee was writing recommendation cards at the front counter, which was a task she usually did quickly and efficiently, two or three minutes per card, clean and done. But she had been on the same card for fifteen minutes. Not because she couldn’t think of what to say but because she had written something, looked at it, and then found herself writing something else entirely in the margin — not a recommendation, not anything related to the book — and had to cross it out and start over.

Dao appeared at her shoulder.

She looked at the card. Then at Lookmhee.

“You’ve been on that one for a while,” she said.

“I’m being thorough,” Lookmhee said.

Dao looked at the crossed-out margin. Said nothing about it. “The poetry section needs dusting.” she said, and went back to the other room.

Lookmhee looked at the crossed-out margin.

It said: the way she tilts her head when she’s deciding something — like a problem she already knows the answer to but wants to be certain—

She crossed it out again. More thoroughly this time.

She finished the recommendation card in four minutes and went to dust the poetry section, which did not need dusting and which she stood in for ten minutes reading spines and thinking about things she was supposed to be not thinking about at work.

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She did not tell the group about the poems.

This was partly because the poems were private and had always been private and she was not ready to change that rule. And partly because she had the strong suspicion that if Becky found out there was an entire notebook — several notebooks, actually — full of poems that were very specifically about Sonya, the whiteboard would need a second panel.

But the poems kept coming.

At night mostly, when the building was quiet and the music from 4C drifted through the wall and she could not sleep. In the mornings sometimes, that half-hour before she had to get up for work when her brain was still soft and unguarded and things came out of it more honestly than they did during the day. Occasionally at work, in the margins of things, which she always crossed out but not always thoroughly enough.

They were not sad poems. That was the thing she kept noticing about them. She had spent a lot of her writing life writing about sadness — about endings, about distance, about the particular loneliness of feeling like you were always slightly on the outside of things. Those poems had a specific texture she knew well.

These were different. These were the kind that came from fullness rather than lack. From the presence of something rather than its absence. She didn’t have a lot of experience writing those and she found them both easier and harder than the sad ones — easier because the feeling was right there, present and clear, not something she had to excavate from memory. Harder because fullness was more exposed than sadness. Sadness had a kind of cover. Fullness just sat there in the light and asked to be looked at.

She was looking at a half-finished one — sitting on the floor of her apartment on a Wednesday evening, back against the bed, notebook on her knees — when her phone buzzed.

A message from the group chat. From Freen.

does anyone else think about the fact that we all ended up in the same building like what are the odds actually

Then Becky: statistically very low

Then TK: and yet

Then Engfa: I think about it sometimes. It feels like something.

A pause.

Then Sonya: It is something.

Lookmhee read Sonya’s message three times. She thought about the way Sonya used the group chat — sparingly, deliberately, only when she had something she actually meant to say. She thought about it is something and what it meant coming from someone who dealt exclusively in things she meant.

She typed: I think about it too. A lot, actually.

She put the phone down. She looked at the half-finished poem on her notebook page.

She picked up her pen.

She finished it.

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On Friday she went to Common Ground alone — Sonya had a work thing, an author event at the press that ran into the morning, and had sent her a message the night before that said simply: Can’t make Saturday. Author event. Next week. Which was so completely Sonya — no apology, no elaboration, just the information and the implicit promise of continuation — that Lookmhee had smiled at her phone for longer than was reasonable.

She sat at their table. She ordered her latte and a piece of banana bread. She opened her notebook.

She had been there for forty minutes, writing steadily, when someone sat down across from her.

She looked up.

It was not Sonya. It was a woman she didn’t recognize — around her age, with paint-stained fingers and a canvas bag overflowing with papers and the slightly distracted look of someone who had been working for a long time and had recently surfaced.

“Sorry,” the woman said, looking around. “Is someone sitting here? Every other table is—”

Lookmhee looked. It was true — the café had filled up while she was writing. Every other table was taken.

“It’s fine,” Lookmhee said. “Please.”

The woman sat. She ordered coffee. She pulled papers out of her bag and spread them on her side of the table with cheerful disregard for the limited space. She looked at Lookmhee’s notebook.

“Writer?” she asked.

“Sometimes,” Lookmhee said. The answer she always gave.

“What kind?”

A pause. “Poems, mostly.”

The woman nodded with the expression of someone who found this genuinely interesting rather than politely so. “Are they about something specific or the general everything?”

Lookmhee looked at her notebook. At the page she had been writing on. At the poem that was, like all the recent ones, unmistakably about a specific person and a specific feeling and a specific wall between two apartments.

“Specific,” she said. “Recently.”

“That’s the best kind,” the woman said. “The specific ones are the ones that end up being universal. The general ones just stay general.” She looked at her papers. “I paint. Same thing — when I paint something specific it reaches people. When I try to paint something that means everything it means nothing.”

Lookmhee thought about the bookstore display. About books for when you are starting over and the woman who had cried at the register.

“Yeah,” she said. “I think that’s right.”

They worked in companionable silence for a while — the woman with her papers, Lookmhee with her notebook. The café buzzed around them. The morning light shifted through the window.

At some point the woman packed up her papers and stood to leave. She looked at Lookmhee’s notebook one more time.

“Whoever they’re about,” she said, simply and without preamble, the way people said things when they had no reason to be anything but direct, “I hope they know.”

She left.

Lookmhee looked at her notebook.

She thought: they don’t. Not yet.

She thought: but they will.

She turned to a new page. At the top she wrote a title — something she didn’t usually do, usually she just wrote and let things be untitled and formless. But this one wanted a title.

She wrote: the one who keeps showing up.

Then she wrote the poem.

It was the most honest thing she had written since moving to the city. It was also the most terrifying, in the specific way that honest things were terrifying — because once something was written down clearly it became real in a way it wasn’t before, and real things had weight and consequence and could not be un-known.

She finished it. She read it back.

She closed the notebook.

She sat with her cold latte and looked at the table where Sonya usually sat with her black coffee and her phone and her careful, steady presence, and thought about the woman with the paint-stained fingers.

Whoever they’re about. I hope they know.

She picked up her phone. She opened the group chat.

She did not send anything. She just looked at the list of names — Engfa, Freen, Becky, TK, and Sonya — and thought about all the things she had not said yet and all the things Sonya had not said yet and the specific, tender, slightly nerve-wracking feeling of two people moving toward each other slowly and on purpose.

She put the phone back down.

She picked up her pen.

On the inside back cover of the notebook — the place she reserved for things she wasn’t ready to put anywhere else — she wrote one line.

Just one.

She closed the notebook.

She left it unread, that one line, for now. It would be there when she was ready.

She gathered her things, left a tip, and walked back to the building in the thin autumn sunlight, her notebook in her bag and the poem inside it and the feeling of something getting ready, slowly and surely, to become itself.

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That evening, the music through the wall started earlier than usual.

Lookmhee was making dinner — something simple, rice and vegetables, the kind of cooking she did when she wanted to do something with her hands but not think too hard — when she heard it. Soft, low, the same kind of music it always was, the kind she had never been able to identify but had come to think of as simply Sonya’s music — the music Sonya listened to when she was home and not performing composure for anyone.

She turned down the heat on the stove.

She stood in her kitchen and listened.

After a while she picked up her notebook from the counter where she had left it and opened it to the title page of the poem she had written that morning. The one who keeps showing up. She read it once, standing in her kitchen with the music coming through the wall and the smell of dinner and the evening light going gold through the window.

Then she closed it. Carefully. Like something she was keeping safe.

She thought: not yet.

She thought: but the poem exists now. It’s real now. And when the time comes—

She thought: I’ll know.

She went back to stirring the rice and listened to the music and smiled at the wall between her apartment and 4C in a way that was, she fully acknowledged, completely ridiculous.

She didn’t stop smiling.

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