Where do I start?

It is important to start where all stories should start, at the beginning, but most rarely do.

There’s a viral video going around lately that shows a man in his 50s-60s standing behind a pulpit. His collared shirt, shuffled notes, and the line of men seated behind him on the stage communicate that he has been placed up front and up high to be heard.

He seems kind. This isn’t the kind of video where men stand up and say outrageous things and paint, with broad strokes, the world around them.

He stumbles over his words, with increasing frustration, as he desperately tries to say the word “beginning”.

Awkwardly, his brain stuck on a loop that his mouth can’t follow, he tries again and again. Yet, the harder he tries to say the word, the less capable he becomes. The accent that trips around the mispronounced word indicates that English isn’t his first language, and, frankly, since English is my ONLY language, I have mad respect for his linguistic skills while chuckling along at his frustration when the right word, beginning, will not come out.

“In the beninging, the begnin, the…”

It goes on for the requisite 90 seconds allotted for entertainment, and the comments vary as we all understand what it is to have something to say, and the words come out wrong. We all know that feeling where we can’t even start our stories because the jumble when we start creates a roadblock. Not a lack of things to say, but so many words rushing toward expression that we stand, frozen, unable to utter even the simplest words to start.

It is important to start where all stories should start, at the beginning, but most rarely do. We like to tell stories backwards.

The team won!!! Let me tell you how they struggled and overcame. She got the job!! Now let me tell you about the time she wondered if she’d lose it all, but rest assured, she didn’t!

We can breathe easy as we hear of angst and the loss, the fear, and the failure, because we know that it resolves. The chord finishes in a major third. The crowd leaps to its feet in celebration.

Sometimes, starting the story where it all began lulls the reader into a false sense of security. We make assumptions and hurry to finish sentences we don’t understand, so we can envision a future that doesn’t match reality. We don’t like it when the characters veer off and do their own thing. The dissonance is painful.

All stories have a beginning and a middle, and eventually, all stories end. Too often, the middle stretches on and on beyond the point where the soul is tired of the living and yearns for a time to tell everything in hindsight. To just finish it. Make it stop. The sheer exhaustion of the living of some stories tempts us to end them before they are finished. Like an incomplete series, a half-watched movie. We’ve seen too much already, we assume the ending, and we lose sight of the plot. The slog through the twists is too much.

Today I’m trying to tell a story about a boy. A beautiful boy with wide brown eyes, an infectious smile, and just the lightest touch of red in his hair. A boy whose quick wit and easy personality made friends for him across the world and in cultures unaccustomed to a gentle American. A kind American. A thoughtful American.

I don’t know where to start.

Because, in the beninging, the beginning, it was anguish and six months of colic and anxiety and an inability to meet needs. A baby who screamed and fought to sleep. A mom who wept with pillows over her head because the sleep deprivation, the demands, and the sheer volume were overwhelming.

The 5 am feedings, quiet in the room while he nursed, the peace when we both finally smiled at each other. Those moments were the glue that held us together through long days and even longer nights.

Or does this start in an even earlier moment when a blurry, black and white ultrasound showed me a profile, and my heart quickened in a moment of instantaneous love that never stopped.

See, this is where my words collide against each other in my heart. Words of love butt up against words of confusion and pain. Words of memories, locked like sunshine in a bottle, swirl with the echoes of an enraged repetition of “fuck” screamed in rage at a life where choices made meant choices lost. Words that reflect like laser-focused mirrors come back at me to slice me open and lay me bare in failure and fear, anxiety, and the sheer weight of an empty chair at the family dinner table.

I don’t know what words to use to both honor the boy I love and be honest about the man he’s chosen to become because, to me, they are the same. He is worth every drop of kindness, affection, and loyalty I possess. I will never see him and not want to hold him. I will never think of him and not want him to succeed, to win, to live, to thrive.

And yet… I sit here with a text on my phone, the last communication between us, and it reads like a farewell.

I can’t give you money anymore. We are your family, not an atm.

My son, my darling, my beloved, brilliant boy, is an addict.

I don’t know when the story changed and the chapter titles morphed from “My Dream to Succeed” into “My Dream is to Simply Survive the Last Bad Binge” or “I Keep Trying to End It and It Just Hasn’t Happened Yet”.

The story will be written. Here in parts. Cried out in sobs on the back porch, in parts. Whispered to the dark in those 3 am confessions. In parts. But this must be written. It must be.

I don’t have an ending. Maybe it ends with all the chairs filled at dinner. Or with an urn filled with ashes on the table next to the window. It could end in the silence of a disappeared life and no answers, no conclusion, no ending. Just what remains of a family and an open book with blank pages while we try to live beyond that story and into other stories where love and light and laughter still exist, somehow, beyond grief.

For nearly 26 years, I have loved this boy. Ferociously yet flawed. Sacrificially but selfishly. In weakness and with strength. With intensity and emotional neglect.

And so I begin.

There once was a boy, dressed in red pajamas, who giggled from the cupboard and waited for me to find him. It was simple then, and his giggles easily and often turned to body-shaking laughter. Every morning, he snuggled close, soft curls around his ears, wide brown eyes taking in the world.

There is a man, dressed in black and chains, tattoos crawling up his arm, a skull scribed on his rib cage. He hides in darkness and alleyways. His laughter, harsh and cynical.

I can’t find him.

But I’ll never stop looking.