Coda 

After Alexis Almeida Things I Have Made a Fiction

You once wrote a book in which you remembered everything. There was smell and taste, other forms of touch, and piano too. Pea soup left on the counter; there was shag carpet and blue walls. You tried to distinguish the rooms while writing but you kept tripping between them: the pine attic, the small stage, the white house attached to the theater by a thin corridor that got cold in the winter. Insulation was expensive. You could hear the dry rasp of ice being chipped off car windows and feel the staircases, so many, which led to basements and boilers and the second floor where you sensed more than your will to describe.

You turned the rooms into fictions so you could experience yourself at a distance or know the emptiness of beginning. Write all the way through. So, if you want you can write it, so it didn’t happen. You might experience this as desire foregoing over pages: what you won’t say. And this, too, is a form of remembrance. You wrote about wool costumes, hairspray, mothballs. You wrote to touch the immaterial, carols and tides and waking became more of a chore as sleep transformed into writing, became sour breath that tinged the taste of your real.

You ended up writing about stepping across time, stepping across stones at low tide at your grandparent’s house when they still lived on the bay and your confidant was the dog. Together you were lost, stewing pine needles, mud, and blood worms to survive, as if the tall lighted house wasn’t yours. And, believing you were alone you’d yell down the bay and the stones in your voice skipped the surface, then drowned. You wrote a book. Then dreamed it. The characters switched places but still his carpet was rough, the sky dark blue, and the air was so cold, so cold still.

You long for this writing as a record, as a wish for annulment, of self and of words or rather their ordering. In order to be well, you would steal Dr. Pepper from the garage to drink on the small bus to school and confide in your friend (who would die three years later) that he wanted to marry you. But of course, not right now. You were writing to discover but you got closer to knowing. You had been tracing something, impressions of wind, or the repetitive pattern of a hand in motion, which was both itself and a carrier for something else to crank the momentum shuttling you forward into what still passed.