(Beginnings)

Said tells us that in order to classify a beginning, we must view it retrospectively, placing our perspective in both the present--after a thing has taken shape--and the past--the moment we later mark as a beginning. I cannot know I have begun until after I have already begun. Of course the phrase, "I will begin..." belies this notion a bit, but still a useful way of looking at path.

I might have said that the beginning of my journey occurred on the plane, or at the airport, or sitting at the bar at Mon. Or else with the end of the long living arrangement, or with my desire to travel and teach English, the germ of which sent me to France to study that Summer. Or the tour I took with my grandfather, the decision in high school to resist Spanish in favor of French. The early resistance to common paths... and so on into the oblivion of discerning what might be my earliest memory, what factors conspired to give me that faculty, all the way back to the evolution of life on earth; the moment of creation; beyond.

Sitting with coffee in a delicate white cup, ceramic butterfly, a fiction of lessons learned on the tips of my fingers, such reductions seem as if they might have moved forward a thousand million different ways, and could not constitute a consistent explanation for a present state of things. How many reasons have I listed, depending on the time of day, for speaking harshly to you? Never lying, but also never quite correct. There is a cognitive dissonance in my understanding of motivation. Would I prefer just to say that I am sorry? To try not to do it again.

My desk needs dusting. I found under it a journal, misplaced, in which I located the process of a song I wrote about a year. I had sworn I'd written it earlier. And in which the daily struggle of relating to myself after I have been altered, even smothered, by a loss, seem not too different from those I faced this morning. Do I always wake and think of such things, or am I capable of distracting myself for periods?

And it is cold enough for snow. It makes San Antonio quiet. Sleepy. It makes me into silences. I found an echo of that time, and it carried all the way through. I was left in the end, empty and tired. I no longer wish to pretend that forward is a place I am moving. Because if I don't know where I began, the course is almost impossible to plot.

And for all of this I am truly grateful. How's that for dissonance.