There is no greater puzzle, no greater struggle, than the beginning. The first note of a sonata, the first stanza of a poem, the first stroke of a painting. All that comes after builds on what came before, and if the scaffolding established at the start is weak, the whole piece comes tumbling down.
It was the reason I never put my own skills to use, the reason my house had always been a tangled jungle of loose leaf pages, saturated with ideas I never had the courage to pursue.
I would come home from work, bleary eyed and broken. I would descend the shadow engulfed stairs that led to my desk beneath the moldering ceiling of a neglected basement, and there, in the dark, I would set pen to paper. For a little while, I would labor under the delusion that this time, things would be different; this time, I would follow through with my design; this time, I would impart substance and life to an idea that I was certain could change the world.
Then I would stare at the latest fruit of my manic depressive mind, pondering its intricacies, its peculiarities. I would sigh, turn out the light and go to bed, abandoning my brain child to rot along with the house’s foundation.
Time slipped, until I grew old. I never stopped telling myself that this time, things would be different. But one day I fell ill, and after an extended stay in the hospital I realized I wasn’t going home. On the precipice of death, I thought of all my unfinished designs, and like an absent father, I wailed and lamented for all the lost years that I could never reclaim with my children.
Better to have tried, I thought, to have started something imperfectly than not to have started at all. But somehow that was worse, somehow that was more painful.
“I loved you all,” I whispered, but as I closed my eyes, as the final curtain began to fall on my life, I realized with mounting terror that this was a lie.
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