A Single Word

I have been churning that story idea over and over in my mind. I've been thinking of it as I fall asleep, as I walk to and from work. It's in the numbness of my limbs in the cold; it's in the violent red behind my eyelids as I blink into the dazzling sun. I suppose, as with the journey that begins with a single step, so does every story begin with a single word. Calvino has expressed that every interpretation, every reading of a text constitutes a kind of violence, for every reader psychically molests the text and turns it into something different. Every word exists both in concrete materiality and in a nether-world that extends beyond. It's a paradox – every word brings forth a wordless world of desires, fears, prophesies, and possibilities. It's not the words that I write down onto paper, but this nether-world that I fear. It's the voices of all the people within me, all the different people that I am, and all the people who have influenced me in my becoming myself – the tug-of-war between word and air, surface and depth, the known and the unknowable.

And so, I hesitate and have been keeping notes only in my head. I want that first word to ring true, like the moment before a newborn child takes its first breath. I want that perfect, impossible word, the one that hangs by a thread, between here and there, now and forever. Maybe that word is “if” -- those two letters encapsulate so very much. Can two-hundred pages flow out of “if”? Can voices be born, worlds be created, lives and loves blossom from this single word?