A Piece With No Beginning

Somewhere beyond the edges of memory, before the world had even begun its first exhale, there was a story. But like the night before the dawn, it had no beginning. It existed only in fragments — unspoken, unnamed, unnoticed. Yet, it shaped everything. Every thought. Every action. Every life.

I have always wondered about it, the way something can persist without a start. It’s as if the truth of it lingers, threaded through the fabric of the world, even though we can’t always see the weave. It’s in the silence between words, the pause between heartbeats. It’s in the stories we don’t tell, the dreams we don't remember, the histories that get lost in time’s shadow.

I met an old man once who understood this kind of story. He sat beside the fire at dusk, his eyes the color of forgotten rivers, eyes that had seen things he could not share. He told me of a piece — no title, no beginning, just a wordless knowing. “You’ve heard it, even if you don’t know it,” he said, tapping the side of his temple, “and when you do, it will be as though you always have.”

I listened, but it felt like the words slipped through the cracks of my mind. I only caught fragments of them, like pieces of a puzzle lost in the corners of a dark room. “But why is there no beginning?” I asked him one evening as the fire’s glow began to flicker.

“Because,” he said, his voice low as if weighed down by centuries, “sometimes, a story doesn’t need one. It doesn’t need a start to make sense. It only needs to be.”

He paused, and I felt the weight of his silence. “Think of it like this,” he continued. “Have you ever stood at the edge of a cliff, not knowing how you got there, but knowing that you’ve always been there, in a way?”

I nodded, though I had never been to a cliff, at least not one of that depth. But I knew what he meant.

The old man chuckled softly, shaking his head. “Stories, like people, can live without origins. What they become is more important than where they started.”

I didn’t fully understand him then, but in the years that followed, I came to see the truth in his words.

There are moments in life when time itself seems to dissolve, when the ticking of the clock becomes irrelevant. A glance across the street, a flash of sunlight through the trees, the rustle of leaves — it’s as if these things were always there, in another time, waiting for you to recognize them.

A story with no beginning is like this: it has always existed, waiting for the right moment to come into view. Like a seed buried beneath the soil, it doesn’t ask for a moment to sprout. It simply does, when the conditions are right. And often, the conditions are right when we least expect them.

The truth is, we all carry fragments of this piece — that story with no beginning — within us. Some are more aware of it than others. Some search for its meaning in the quiet moments of solitude. Others are too busy to stop and listen to its silent hum. But it doesn’t go away. It’s always there, waiting for us to turn toward it.

I remember sitting in the quiet of my room one night, watching the stars flicker like distant fires. I had come to a point in my life where nothing made sense, where the paths I had taken seemed to lead nowhere. In that silence, I felt the stirrings of something ancient. A feeling, more than a thought. A knowing, more than a memory. I closed my eyes, and for a brief, fleeting moment, I understood: this was the piece with no beginning.

I had been walking alongside it my entire life, but only now, in the stillness, could I see it clearly. It wasn’t something to be solved or understood; it was something to be experienced. It was not a riddle with an answer, but an unfolding. It was a breath in the middle of a long, restless night. It was the pause between two notes of music, the space where meaning rises.

So I left it there, in the stillness. I let it exist as it was. I no longer needed to know where it began. The more I sought answers, the more elusive the piece became. But when I stopped searching, when I simply was, it whispered its presence to me, as if it had always been waiting for me to listen.

Now, every time I find myself lost or searching for meaning, I remember that quiet fire, the old man’s eyes, and the piece with no beginning. I remind myself that sometimes, there is nothing to find but the acceptance of what already is.

I no longer look for answers. I simply let the story be.

Because maybe, just maybe, this is the beginning.