I mean to begin to begin but the day rings. I mean to see the beginning give way but the morning buzzes. To see the middle thru the middle, but the afternoon crashes, the shade chimes in, the magic hour goes off but no sound, just traffic. I mean to make it an evening, but night falls and I miss it. I want to sleep but nothing happens. Nothing comes to me. The silence vibrates. No, it doesn’t. Here I am again. Is already behind me.
*
The story starts over, leaves the neighbourhood behind, takes every tunnel, heads to a whole other kind of weather. The story emerges where rain’s coming down, but the sun is out, and the story knows it's fine. The story is unfurling in the open and the local bookstore wants to mark the occasion. The local readers want to send all their hearts to the marking. Their hearts wonder casually if this is the perfect version of this particular story, as if it’s a casual thing to wonder. But they say nothing, and their silence insists the story’s doing good, though their silence also wonders what for. Who for. It wonders to what beginning or end. The story has me turning the hearts’ silence’s questions over, stacking them on their side. So I mark the story with more questions for the stack: does the good done right give way to something greater done right? Is this the end of a beginning, or the beginning of an end? If it was done right? What else could be left behind?
*
I began the morning before the morning even began, wound up for the good of my big news, only for no good news to be mine at all. I watched the good come and go, someone else’s, and be gone. Now I sit with the space I’d made for what could’ve been, the sheer chunk of the room it would’ve taken up. Like a piece of impractically precious furniture on order for way too long, and then cancelled, its promise cleared a suddenly unreasonably large-looking corner of the room for itself, and the room sowed a loss for which there now was no good reason to bother, neither the room or the promise now quite able to recall what used to be there, what was uprooted as the space-clearing began. So now the empty space just lingers and I watch it. A bit of time passes amidst the lingering. A streak of light begins to creep thru the window. Then it sweeps right into the empty space. So I set something down in it, nothing worth mentioning, and watch the light hit it. I watch nothing worth mentioning brighten up the space till the light moves on from it.
Till the light leaves the room till next morning. I begin the morning doing the same. I leave the space a bit less empty.
