_{Venus Major}

1. (I typed 2 with a dot, it shows 1. How come?)

2 - THE BEGINNING

Everything has a beginning. Even the things that feel as if they’ve always existed. Even me. Even this. Even you.

There is a moment, somewhere between silence and breathing, when things begin to flow, like water in a dry riverbed whose name still exists on Google Maps. It’s like how light forms streaks on the wall when the train rushes past. I don’t know exactly when it began - or what “it” is - but I felt it. The beginning. Not of people, animals or ideas, but of something deeper. A consciousness, a wave of knowing. Knowing and being. It didn’t come as a shock, nor as a storm. No. It came slowly. Inescapable. Overpowering.

My eyes are always what people remember. And my uncle was the first to comment. “Doe’s eyes”, he said. Your eyes, they say, and sometimes you can close them because they see something that reminds them of themselves. But my eyes aren’t mirrors. They’re windows. And what lives within them isn’t always of this world. Sometimes I wonder if they’re truly looking, or just afraid of what I don’t say. Because my eyes speak without me. They attract, conceal, judge, travel back in time.

I looked at him and saw him. A man, worn out. Full of words that caress, expose, signals of despondency, with a hint of bitterness and self-loathing. Someone who thought and behaved as if love were a confession of guilt. A person who believed his weakness would become his strength, if only he hid it well enough. But I saw him. Completely. And yet that wasn’t the beginning.

It all started earlier. When I was a toddler and felt the first fault lines beneath the surface of what made me “me”. A kind of vibration, a seismography of the soul, the refusal to be part of the whole. Not fear, but expectation. A knowing that silence is finite.

I don’t believe in coincidence. I believe in convergences. In breaking points. In the way a glance or word lingers. In how breath catches. The universe doesn’t whisper - it pushes. And I always fell with my eyes open.

There was a child, it was inside him - in that man, that bastard of a man - he carried it within. Malformed perhaps, a shadow of what could have been. But it was there. I felt it and saw it. It was in his voice. He didn’t know it, but his body was already mourning something that didn’t yet exist. Something that didn’t want to be born. And yet he spoke like someone hoping speech could ward off death.
But words don’t make a beginning. They reveal what has already begun.

My beginning was my gaze. My strength lay not in what I said, but in what I saw. When I looked, everything changed, grew lighter or heavier. True things gained weight. False things fell apart. That is my gift. My curse, perhaps. And he knew it. Because he trembled every time I looked at him - not because I’m hard and cold, as they always think. The truth is: I am full. Overflowing. And if I don’t look, if I don’t shut myself off, then I overflow. Then all eyes that meet mine become vessels for what I feel. Then I live a thousand lives at once. But sometimes - sometimes I must look. And in his case, I had to. Not because I wanted to know who he was, but because I recognised him and knew who I would be with him.

I saw the future. No straight line, no predictable path. A dirt track, weeks of mud, forgotten morals and chilly mornings. But also fire: a campfire, a wood stove and the fire in the face of a child who would hate me with ease. Who would read me as I read him. Who would know I had chosen. For or against. For myself, for him, for us.

Everything has a beginning. Even the end. And perhaps that’s the greatest secret: that every beginning causes clearing, drainage. Whoever allows something, wins, must also give something up, lose.
I am who I am. And I’m not afraid of his anger, nor his despair. I am the past, the present, the future in which grows the child that was never born or wanted. In that grows the judgement. And in his eyes I see mine - not mirrors, but windows with legion possibilities. This is only the beginning.

_{6.5.25
@almaguer - 1. exodus}