One
begins a story only to realize that one has
in
fact jumped to the middle, and suddenly feels
obliged
to begin, once again, at the beginning,
but
this time, at the very, very beginning—freshly
laundered
bed sheets that have yet to fall victim to
the
weight of an exhausted worker or lovers who
have
not touched the familiar surface of each other’s
skin
for seven nights in a row—before being hit
by
the reality that even that is not the true beginning,
for
the sheets were dirty before they were clean
and
long before that, they were lumps of cotton—
at
which point one is forced to consider the other
beginnings:
the beginning of the worker’s day,
the
couple’s first rendezvous, their respective
days
of birth and so on and so forth and one can do
nothing
but cry over the impossibility of beginning
a
story and the inevitability of wanting to try anyway.