to start with her, because it had started with her. She had spread her legs at a point I’ll never remember and somebody must have PUSH! And out I came (and isn’t that strange that we never remember, blessed to never remember, that, but keep track of the day as the years go by)

to start with her because I did. This, this book did not start with her, but I’ll get to that at some point, maybe, maybe not, depending if I have much of other things to say, but I doubt that will happen, I will get to that because you’ll need a reason for all this, an explanation for these words, these inks stains that are never going to be seen as simply stains, but as ‘words’, as ‘never going to be seen as ink stains’ (and there’s something fascinating to all that, to the idea of writing on paper, drawing lines that mean much less than what the writer writes and much more, as in, other than what the writer intended)
to start with her and I write of things other than her

to star with her and the things that brought me to her, her to here, here to the life that had happened upon her. But the words: ‘life happened upon her.’ Listen to that, another digression from the start. Life happens upon us. We, in being born, did not ask of it. People, such as parents, are accidents. Nothing in life is ever planned out. One can say, ‘I will go out and do the laundry today’ and go out and very well do the laundry. One can then turn and say, ‘am I not now a prophet?,’ smirking. Yes and no: you did what you wanted but you did not expect for there to have been so few people at the laundromat; you did not expect to be caught staring at someone’s underwear by an eight year old girl; you did not expect for you to have lost a sock, or for the day to be sunny when the forecast was for rain. The fact that a car heeded the traffic light and did not mow you down while you were crossing the street; the fact that you are still living and breathing is a culmination of random events. You think you have control over your life and, to a very limited extent, you do. However, one never knows what people they will meet today, even if they’ve seen the same people for years. Point being: suddenly, every time, anytime, all the time, ‘suddenly you are alive and breathing and you have nothing to with it.’

to start with her, and it is very difficult after the initial push to continue. The idea fades or becomes something else until the motivation changes also. It had started as: ‘To start with her…’ and it is now: ‘My throat is dry. The phone has not rung. I am waiting. I am thinking ‘someone else has not called’, and I wonder if anything had happened. I am waiting for someone who is not the her of the moment, or the her that I began with, but an other her someone else entirely who, when I pay attention to, receives much of my attention. This other ‘her’ who we’ll get to at some later point other than this page.’ And, of course, it is much more than that. Lost in the translation, so to speak and so, to ‘speak’, much of the translation has to be lost or I wouldn’t be speaking, I’d be thinking, and I’ve done enough of that, for now. Now I cannot simply ‘think’, I don’t have much time, I need to think and write, that’s the point of this: to see how much will I think to write and what I write of my thinking. I don’t have much time to just think anymore than Life at its end

to start with her, that brought about me, that brought me up. That, the latter, I know, or most of, from about age 2, everything before is retelling, from her and a smattering of others, it is not much, not chronological I don’t think she has even tried to place it in some proper order, or maybe she does not want to speak of it, or maybe it’s left and a little sorrow rest in her mind for that blurry thing that was once the memory of her childhood. I think it’s a combination of it all, I could be very wrong. There are a limited amount of truths that one will get when one asks questions of another. There is only so far that another will let one prod. There is a border that defines another’s sanctuary, a place that nothing in the real world is allowed to trespass, a line that, once past it, even her son is held as a stranger.

and to start with what I know and don’t know; to piece the little I have and to start with her, by filling in the spaces around her, of what she had come into, of what was around her, and eventually, brought her here, to get here eventually; the here and now because I know more of that, of the her and now (But when one reads a novel, let’s say a mystery, with a number of pages missing in and in-between the beginning, can one ever understand where and what exactly is going on in the novel’ Can one actually see the ‘whole painting’ when it is not presented in its totality’ Is it the same painting’ Is the outcome and all the loose threads tied up just as neatly when one has not had all the facts’ But there is the limit of what can be asked, a point where one must understand and accept what one is given only, and to interpret as best as one could and to move on from there; to accept and discard; to, somehow, face incompleteness and, not fill the holes, but to move through and reach and forget)

she had started in a shack and born, literally, onto the earth, for there were no floors. Where she was born was in a shack and onto the earth, her mother giving birth without painkillers or delivery rooms or doctors or nurses; without any release except to give birth, to release the seventh child from her womb. To pause, to side step, to regard ‘the seventh child’: there were six previous others, five of which survived; four boys, two live to this day, and the rest were girls; three others came after the seventh, three more births, one of which was stillborn; the first birth to die was a set of male twins, that starved, or were strangled, depending or your point of view, from lack of their mother’s milk. It sounds harsh, almost inhumane to even consider such a possibility in this day and age, but this is not then. Then was a shack that a man and woman put together with their bare hands, where electricity was seen only at night, in the clouds of storms, where all their children were born in this shack, for there was no way to reach a doctor (he was in another village and that’s what doctors did: traveled within a particular ‘state’, for lack of a better word) and so, also, the majority of times without medical supervision and in the beginning, with a mid-wife until the mother could do it on her own, onto the earthen floor, in sunlight or candlelight, with, as the first born got older, one of the siblings running to the creek to fetch water (most probably; these things are imagined, assumed, filling gaps, for there was no running water, before they even had a pump, there was only the creek, five minutes away running time) and another cry, another baby.

this is mostly snippets, this starting, this moving in time back to proceed forth from now, to here. This not of her memory, it is what is left of mine from what she has told me. To break the sequence of the beginning and to have my own memory before: there, going home from somewhere, I do not remember, it does not matter