How My Story Began

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.”       —  Helen Keller

He wanted me to write about the dinosaurs.

Despite the potential for the next prehistoric blockbuster, that just wasn’t my story. Having no background to pull from, no experience to foster insight, I could not do it. Perhaps I should have tried. Who knows?

But that was not my story. I said this, aloud, because I felt it. I could feel it deep down within my very soul. What was my story? I had no idea. But that wasn’t it.

Something about it called to me, though. A small piece, yet it ripped into me, soundlessly screaming a message that I could not hear. Like pressing the mute button on the remote control. Nagging me, pulling me down, compressing my mind into a tiny sphere that pulsated with the rhythm of that silent song.

Who-om … Who-om … Who-om …

And there it was, floating in the space between day and night, sleeping and waking. Frozen in place, but still the pulsating continued. Mesmerized, I found myself motionless as I stared into the void, grasping at silky nothings that slipped and slithered right from my cerebral grasp—when that tiny piece snaked its wispy tendrils across the void to nestle into the innermost regions of … my heart. For it was there that I first felt the touch of warmth that spreads outward across the torso, into the limbs, and finally … into the mind.

I couldn’t move. My legs were tucked under me as I sat on the sofa thinking of nothing at all and … everything. But not in a single moment. That first single moment was one simple sentence.

And I spoke it aloud, the words hidden inside and trickling out faster and faster, as everything came to me. But in that initial flash when my mind tingled from the warmth that radiated from my chest, and the feeling became thought, heart to mind and mind to mouth, I spoke only that one sentence.

The sentence that changed my life.

(No, I can’t tell you what it is because it would spoil the book.)

“Sometimes a story catches your imagination so much it has to be told. That is what I love about writing. It lets the images in your mind burst forth into words drawing a vivid picture that takes you away on a journey that would otherwise be impossible.”      —   S.E. Smith

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