Listening to some mix of someone else’s favourite music after a phone call with my mother, and I’m shaking, since that’s what I do when I’m angry and yet can’t say it and so instead I’m here, listening to I know not what and writing it down instead of saying, because when it comes to saying things that matter I’m stunningly inarticulate. Hell, I can write it to the wind, but can’t ever say it. Never.

And it gets me thinking. About beginnings. There have to be some after so many endings, but not just that. About how you begin. Not in a practical way, that’s easy. But how would you ever even know where to start with someone else. Like properly start, to start to let them in. To let them know you, without lying and constructing barriers and wearing however many faces and without being all brittle or having lots of addictions to hide behind that become the issues. How do you start and be absolutely honest. How do you lie next to someone and show them the marks on your skin, the map of you underneath it and say this is when and this was then? What point do you rewind back to, to when you were seven, or two or twelve? And how do you remember that they have to do it too, that they have all these bits they’d rather you didn’t see or know and maybe they don’t want to be exposed and cut open either, because at some stage all of that openness becomes currency, and that’s terrifying.

There’s so much to tell. Or sometimes it seems like there is. So many places to begin. Or is there? Do you need to start that way at all? Can you just start with this is now, me now, you now, and do away with all that is past that traps and ensnares and creates a false self, some point of reference that never really represented what you are at all? Or if you do that, live in the present and put the past away does that keep you suspended in a false reality with no grounding, no idea of where either of you came from?

I have no idea.