Our Beginnings are not for us alone . . .

You're a coward now. At six who can reasonably expect you'd be otherwise. But you somehow know that. You know what shame feels like too, but you're not sure why you should feel it.

Your life, as you stand on the dawn of it, scrubbed up and self-aware, is yours, or should have been yours, but it will also be "her’s". It is in the nature of lies to behave thus, furtive but always present like a parasitic twin, or perhaps a symbiote. You don't yet know what "she'll" be to you. You're different, you feel it . . . like a stranger to everyone else, even to yourself, but not to "her".

You're a coward now . . . but you won't always be.

© 2008 Renée Thomas