Writing instead
The file is a hundred and twenty pages. On what happens to the worst things when you put them in order.
A hundred and twenty pages on the phone. I write at night after the pill, an hour, sometimes three, with the screen turned down so the light does not show under the door, which is a habit from the mattress and not a necessity any more, and I keep it anyway.
Here is what I have learned about the worst things. When they are in your body they have no order. They happen all at once, every time, forever. When you put them on a page they have to go one after another, because that is what a page is, and something happens in the going. They do not get smaller. They get a shape. A shape can be carried. That is the whole discovery, and the journalist knew it, and I am grateful to her in a way I will never be able to tell her.
I have written the police station. I have written the lawyer's stairs. I have not written the thing itself, and I know I will have to, and I know that when I do it will be the last time it happens to me in that form, all at once. After that it will be a chapter. I am going to give it a chapter number so that it has to stay where I put it.
The woman under the umbrella asked me what I am always typing. I said a book. She said, about what. I said, about Owerri. She said, then put me in it. I have.