Attempting the impossible

...a dispatch from bewilderness

Once upon a time, there was a woman named it-doesn’t-matter. She lived in a town called I-don’t-remember and then something happened but I forget what.

For some, transformation takes years of practice. Others just get hit by a truck. Oh, right. That’s what happened. I got hit by a truck. The good news was I survived. The bad news was brain damage.

A repurposed object is something that acquires amnesia and forgets what it did before. A “repurposed” human reconfigures any shards she can find of anything she ever knew, like she always just missed a step or a train or a decade.

In my first life, I wrote words in mint condition, sparkling, witty, bracing, brisk. In this life, I began scratching anything I could recall on any surface I could find – paper plates, paper cups, placemats, napkins, coffee stirrers and Popsicle sticks. I called them scraps.

I stuffed them in brown paper shopping bags, then stashed the bags in a closet. In year two, the bags pushed from within again an old hinge and spilled onto the floor. They were not in alphabetical order, not in numerical order, not in chronological order, but out of order, like me.

When a plane crashes, they look for the black box and try to put the pieces together. When a truck crashes into a human, there’s no black box, but I had stacks of scraps. Memoir is how you became who you are.

Amnesic memoir is how you un-became who you were. A portrait of me in thousands of pieces spread upon a cracked and creaking old pine floor.

It’s pretty hard to write a book no matter what and harder with a broken brain. I couldn’t write from memory. I could only write from scraps.

One doctor saw my scans and said if I could write a book, I “would have achieved the impossible.” I decided to do just that. Achieve the impossible. And so I built a book. But I had lost my agents. No agents, no book. And then? And then, I started this stack.

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