middling kyla Here we are, reading in the dark, choosing how to fall apart, which pieces first, arms or legs, lungs or heart, poetry, prose, all other forms of. 050824 ... ovenbird In Kindergarten we learned story structure: beginning, middle, end. One sentence to represent each of the story’s bones. I wrote: We went to visit my grandmother. We played jacks. We went home. Everything tidy and equally weighted. But these days I’m questioning the framework because it occurs to me that the beginning and end of our life stories are abstractions and we only really get to live in the middle. Our beginnings are shrouded in mystery because our minds are not capable of forming memories at the moment of our births. And even if we could retrieve our first experiences we are each dropped into the middle of someone else’s story so that any real beginning is impossible to pinpoint. And our ends will happen without us because death will take all awareness away and return us to where we were before birth and our stories will continue as those who have loved us carry us along in their own narratives so that our ends are not complete until no one is left to remember us. So there is no beginning and no end, at least not that we get to experience directly. We must be satisfied with the inconclusive middle, that suffers from lack of context and frustrates with lack of closure, and refuses to reveal a cohesive trajectory. So I find myself here, in the middle of the middle, volatile and messy, trying to come to terms with the ending that I will never inhabit but gives shape to every day by eliminating the possibility of forever. Meet me here. Speak the story at the center of everything you are. I’ll tell you mine, though imperfectly. And we’ll spin tales until we can’t tell whose book these chapters belong to, until we’ve read between every line, and there’s no room left for another word in the margins. 260416 what's it to you? who go blather from