Pre-story

Every now and then, I have this definite feeling that whatever is happening at that moment, is the beginning of a story. I pick up a bottle of water in the local supermarket on my way to work, drink it in large gulps, walk to the pier, empty it, throw it towards a recycling bin. But the bottle misses and falls down on the ground, rolls toward the edge of the pier, rests there for the tick of a second, then tips over and into the ocean. And there it goes, I think, there’s a story on it’s way, something in the air, a pen falling into the paper.

I watch it fall and then I stop watching it fall, walk off the pier and step onto the beach, the snout of the city; wet, cold, sniffing. And there, rolled up in sundried seaweed like a Bacon Dog, is another bottle, same brand as the one I just drank from, or possibly the very same one, and I think: it’s another sign, the story, the telling. The bottle is filled with wet, heavy sand and something white, round, pearl-like . I put the neck into the water, let the sand wash away, and out tumbles a tiny seashell.

It’s another sign, I think, ridiculously lulled into my own logic, and place the shell against my ear, imagine hearing the flapping of paper in the wind, the turning of a page and then the next page: a fall, undertows, the pier, pillars, and before that: a loose grip, lips, supermarket coolers, tanks of mineral water. The voice sung through a tiny, white spiral, placed in a bottle with the print of my lips around the neck.

But this introduction is from a story of a seashell, not from this story. This story hasn’t started yet. This story starts like this: I was going through my stories one day, craving a voice from elsewhere, that I could not make out of something. Something else, of another colour, something I could not hear.