The hardest thing is always the beginning. That's what they say, right? Taking that first step, pushing past those initial fears and constraits and just moving. And I'm in so many beginnings right now. There's the beginning of rebuilding my home. The beginning of replacing my things. The beginning of my second career. The beginning of putting myself "out there." The beginning of whatever comes after limbo.
There's this elephant in my head. It grows bigger and bigger, gets louder and louder, until it IS the room and it's all I can hear and I hear so much of it that I can only describe it as a silence so loud it both burns and freezes. I have to write about it but I don't know how. How to begin, how to proceed, how to be. Is negativity okay when it's true or should I force myself into a false positivity in the hopes it becomes true later, that the writing of it is the beginning of it?
I have to write about it, sooner or later, because I'm stuck in the writing of it the same way I'm stuck in the reality of it and to be stuck is to be dead. And I have to write about it, because it's getting in the way. I started this blog awhile ago stating that I was embarking on a creative journey, and I have, but I haven't actually written much about it, shared much of it, because this elephant is here, and it has fangs. This void and dysfuction. This four-letter word with teeth. H-O-M-E.
I think a lot about the beginnings of things. Beginnings are impossible to pinpoint. Beginnings are an abstract concept created by human beings out of necessity because we're trying to understand a timelineless world through the lens of time. When did this thing begin? When did this elephant get there? I just go further and further back into time until everything is beginning and then wonder, is that the beginning? There's this concept called the Event Horizon, which is the beginning and the end based on what we know. But of course there must be something beyond that. Is it the beginning?
Beginnings are not points in time. Beginnings are a construct of fiction, of the narrative. Where and when a story begins doesn't matter. It's how it begins that really matters. Beginnings are feelings and catalysts, inspirations and motivations. It's the first line that grabs you or disappoints you, that makes you feel, that causes you to open up or close down. It's that first line that drives you forward, into the text, into the characters and the story, that says, 'buckle up, you're going for a ride.'
So here are some of my favorite opening lines, in random order. Where do they take you? What are your favorite opening lines? What opening lines have grabbed you, and what stories did they lead you to?
1. "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it,if you want to know the truth." — The Catcher in the Rye.
2. "It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not." — City of Glass.
3. "124 was spiteful." — Beloved.
4. "Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu." — Waiting.
5. "The sky above the port was the color of television,tuned to a dead channel." — Nueromancer.
6. "All this happened, more or less." — Slaughterhouse-Five.
7. "We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall." — Tracks.
8. "When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon." — The Last Good Kiss.
9. “Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs.” — Cruddy.
10. "The war in Zagreb began over a pack of cigarettes." — Girl At War.
11. "I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling thateverything was dead." — On the Road.
2. "If you're reading this on a screen, fuck off. I'll only talk if I'm gripped with both hands." — Book of Numbers.
13. "I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.” — Kindred.
4. "If this typewriter can’t do it, then f*** it, it can’t be done.” — Still Life with Woodpeckers.
15. "All stories are love stories.” — Eureka Street.
16. "I keep the Beast running, I keep the 100 low lead on tap, I foresee attacks. I am young enough, I am old enough. I used to love to fish for trout more than almost anything." — The Dog Stars.
17. "Gestures are all I have; sometimes they must be grand in nature." — The Art of Racing in the Rain.
8. "My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on Dec. 6, 1973." — The Lovely Bones.
19. "No matter how hard you try, you will never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spacially unassuming, is a proton." — A Short History of Nearly Everything.
20. “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.” — The Great Gatsby.
21. "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun." — Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
2. "Someone was looking at me, a disturbing sensationif you’re dead." — A Certain Slant of Light.
23. "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." — The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
4. "There are dragons in the twins' vegetable garden." — A Wind in the Door.
25. "Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living." — 2001: A Space Odyssey.