The “really real,” as William James called it, will not be theorized.
My theory was I could tell just the vivid rollercoaster parts.
My writer friends read those pages and said there’s not enough ketchup and too much mustard, so to speak.
“Off the record,” I said, and proceeded to tell them the extra-page details, the ham, bacon, and eggs: the intimate details that made him three-dimensional,
the secrets that would give it all away.
(sigh) they said: “That should be on the page.”
Dammit, I said, in so many words.

I have to say the real thing, but I can’t, cannot,
or think I can’t.
My lovely writing friends write fiction, and they got my fiction brain humming:
Driving northbound on the highway home from that writing meeting I saw how I
could maybe give him a different job, a different city, a different passion—
extend the preface caveats wider to fit in all the dilemmas
and beg for reader pardon.

In fact: in the next moment, stuck in rush-hour traffic, I thought it would be perfect to make him a stonemason
and he would build perfect stone houses, you see, and the metaphor
took me away and I could see it and as I drove
I made the specific sculptures he might create, and I saw this phantom
as his hands strewed gravel, made Stonehenge, taught me words like
igneous and basalt which I already knew but was pretending
for the sake of this geologic fantasy that I did not know
because that made it neater and slightly
better than it was.
I was not really driving on the highway
I was falling in love with this man I’d never met, this man who made analogous art
and I could taste it.
I heard the song of fiction and it was meaningful and good.

I passed exits and off-ramps and knew next with
a sick feeling in my gut like a cruel word or getting fired that
the promise I made for this specific project and only to myself, the formal constraint, was that each sentence should be true.
Each effing sentence.

Could I do it anyway? But that won’t work because I’ve written almost this whole book
(think of the time)
and written myself into a corner of sorts. What now—what the book needs…

Then, I-95 south of Bridgeport around exit 25, I broke up with nonfiction.
I hated it: nonfiction’s flat, frizzy, fizzed-out demanding bitchiness.
There was nothing on that nonfiction highway: no art, no sweetness,
no stonemason
just green square metal signs and the humidity and the asphalt
and it was as sucky as when I was ten, without hope that the future could be
strung with sentences. Like I was ten
and with really bad hair. A home perm. That bad.
(Oglivy. Bangs curled in the wrong direction. The unavoidable really real.)

The relentless realness of facts slung by like roadside debris
and I wondered when exactly I had taken this fraternity pledge
this Bodhisattva vow complete with hazing
Just let it be a novel let it be why not rewrite it as a novel
I had wanted to write fiction, you see, and loved it first. I wanted to
but am not a novelist only because I
am
not
that
good at it.

Or: It turns out I am writing nonfiction because I am stubborn.
I could just switch sides.
There are no sides. There is only the bargain in each project that I make with my self. And those bargains are only as good as every stupid human promise like
I love you.

But then as the difficult industrial lace of rust and fences hemmed me in
and the smokestacks of Bridgeport anchored the sky as I sped past on I-95
I realized I only had to say the next true sentence
and the next true sentence is this:
there is something I cannot tell you
but here is why I cannot tell you
and here’s how it feels not to tell you
but here’s what I can tell you:
I can tell you how he liked his coffee.

and I can tell you the size of my grief at carrying secrets
which is the weight of being alive
and I can tell you why secrets matter sometimes
more than pages
and I can tell you how my thin worn-out secrets
and the promises I make to myself like formal constraints
make me believe
I am still trying to be a good person even though
I have made so many
mistakes.

Sonya Huber is the author of two books of creative nonfiction, Opa Nobody and Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, and a textbook, The Backwards Research Guide for Writers (2011). She teaches at Fairfield University and in the Fairfield Low-Residency MFA Program.