Love in Acapella

Writing the novel

Photo by Ahtziri Lagarde on Unsplash.

With pencils like oars, I wrote a book titled Love in Acapella, a young man became an old man, and he floated

a lake in a small boat and never saw the bottom. He cast his line and watched his bobber float the surface where water bugs made

ripples, and I’ve told you this story many times, how I made it to jail then to prison but rarely made it to shower. I told

you this story, where it goes, how it ends, how the prison guard with her hair tight like a dinner roll shined her flashlight during

night rounds, the clatter of the meal cart, the hope for excitement, and how Dhalgren taught me to write freely. How they clicked

off the lights at night’s end and we listened to howling madness, how we sang Christmas carols out the cracks of our cells and swapped

stories, started conversations with one day and ended them in silence. I told you, after twenty-two years of writing, this was where the writing

began, in a max security cell with a stab resistant pen and notepad barely large enough for poems, how I cobbled

ideas on toilet paper and skin. On November 5th, I gave myself a gift, I was done carrying bags of softening salt, done mopping floods and battling

the broke down washer, done trying to be Vonnegut. I abandoned the draft, pushed it from my mind, and started

over, and when the world spoke, I listened, and said, maybe this Delany knows something about breaking rules and writing

cool red cities. Sometimes you have to break perpendicular to your own patterns to become exactly what you are, and I ate

my first prison meal, infinitely better than jail food, and my cellmate had pink hair, and we marched to the showers, taking

the laughs of the whole unit and swallowed them in solidarity, because in prison your cellmate is all you got, and I listened when he said

he was a woman in a man’s body, and pinned down my tongue so he had space to exist, and we shared stories while he shaved his legs. I wrote

a page for the book and eventually the pages became chapters, and pretty soon I was swimming in words because I’d accepted

I was right where I belonged. Then I was moved to another cell and, eventually, a new prison where they put

me in solitary confinement, and Leandra crossed my mind, from the Paris boulangerie, the way she hoped

for love like a cricket in a large world. These procreating words followed me like a working dog across

ample fields, Jakob the young man fell for a girl in Paris, then returned home not knowing he’d left behind a daughter, and he became

old and sad and spent his time fishing on a lake where he could not see the bottom. And she found him.

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Hey, I’m Roman. I’m working on my debut novel, 20xx, a work in magical realism. I write on Substack.