Chapter 1: The Starting Point

Things always get wet.

They tell me every story needs a starting point, so here's mine: I'm standing in the middle of a maze, and I have absolutely no idea how I got here. Not the metaphorical kind of maze either—though that too—but the very real, very much in-my-head kind. The one where every thought branches into three more, and every corridor leads to another version of myself asking why I took that last turn. Anxiety, they call it. I call it the Maze of My Mind, capital letters and all, because if I'm going to be trapped somewhere, I might as well give it a proper name.

Level One. The Starting Point. Navigating the Initial Confusion.

Sounds like a video game, doesn't it? I wish it were. At least in a game, you get extra lives. I've been running on the same one for decades now, and the graphics are terrible.

But let me back up. Or forward. Time is a flexible concept when your brain refuses to process it linearly. Let me just tell you about the dog.

His name was Sirijus.

Not Sirius, like the star, though that's what everyone assumed. My mother had seen the word written somewhere—on a feed sack, maybe, or scratched into the wall of the old barn—and she'd liked the way it looked. She was like that. She collected words the way other people collected spoons or those little ceramic figurines that serve no purpose except to collect dust. She'd see something, hear something, and it would stick to her like a burr on wool. Then she'd pass it to me, and it would stick to me too.

Sirijus was a mutt. The kind of dog that makes people ask, 'What breed is that?' and the only honest answer is 'yes.' Brown patchy fur, one ear that stood up and one that flopped down like it had given up on life. He had this way of looking at me—not through me, not past me, but at me, like I was the only thing in the world worth looking at. Nobody else ever looked at me that way. Not then. Not for a long time after.

I was maybe seven. Maybe eight. Childhood is a smear of memory when you grow up the way I did, shadows everywhere, light coming in through cracks so thin you had to squint to believe it was real. My father was gone most of the time, working or drinking or both, and my mother was there but not there, present in body but somewhere far away in her head, wandering her own maze. The house we lived in was old and drafty, set back from a road that didn't lead anywhere worth going. Rural madness, I called it later. Post-rural, even. A place where the sky was so big it pressed down on you like a hand.

Yesterday human was even stolt. That's what my mother said once. I never figured out exactly what she meant—her English slipped sometimes, twisted into shapes that weren't quite right but somehow more true than the correct version would have been. Yesterday human was even stolt. Maybe she meant proud. Maybe she meant stubborn. Maybe she meant that people walk around acting like they're solid, like they're built from something permanent, and then the next day they crumble. I think about that sentence a lot. It lives in me like a splinter.

Sirijus died when I was nine. I won't give you the details because this isn't that kind of book, and because I don't have the details to give. What I remember is the absence. One morning he was there, warm and stinking and alive, and then he wasn't. The yard was quieter. The house was emptier. And I learned, for the first time but not the last, that the things you love don't ask permission before they leave.

Death dog sitijus are you theer.

That's how it lives in my memory now. Fragmented. Broken into pieces that don't quite fit together anymore. Sometimes I type it out and stare at it on the screen, wondering if the words themselves hold some meaning I haven't unlocked yet. Are you there? Am I? Were any of us ever really there, standing in that yard under that enormous sky, or did I imagine the whole thing?

I didn't imagine it. That's the problem. I know I didn't. The cracks in my childhood were real, the shadows were real, and so was the light that came through them. Thin, blade-thin, slicing across the floor in the late afternoon. Beautiful, actually. If you can call poverty beautiful. If you can call loneliness beautiful. I do, now. I didn't then. Then it was just cold floors and empty cupboards and waiting for something to change.

Nothing changed for a long time. And then everything changed all at once, which is how change usually works. Not gradually, not gently, but like a door kicked open in the middle of the night. But that's Level Two. We'll get there.

For now, let me stay in the first corridor of the maze, the one where I'm still small enough to think the world is something that happens to other people. The one where I still talk to a dead dog and pretend he answers. Where the sky is delta peaceful, delta evening, and I can see it like a vision—from desert, eye of god, whatever that means. My mother's words again, stuck to me like burrs. Next moon its been already were are the sky down and back did you see the sky. She said that once, pointing upward, and I looked, and I saw it. Whatever she saw. Something vast and close and impossibly gentle.

I think that's what saved me, in the end. Not religion, not therapy, not any of the systems people offered me like gifts I was supposed to be grateful for. What saved me was the sky. The actual sky. The way it opened up above our miserable little house and said, without saying anything, you are small and that's fine. You are part of something so large it doesn't even notice your pain, and somehow that's comforting.

That and the cracks. The light in them.

I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me pull back to the starting point, the place where the maze begins and I'm standing there with nothing but confusion and a slightly damp sense of determination. Picture it: a girl, a yard, a sky, a ghost of a dog with one ear up and one ear down. She doesn't know yet that she's going to spend the rest of her life navigating corridors that twist and double back. She doesn't know about the wrong turns coming, the lost hearts, the setbacks. She doesn't know there will be moments of insight either, lightbulbs going off in dark corners, illuminating the path for just long enough to take the next step.

She just stands there. Breathing. Looking up.

And the maze waits.

Here's what I know now that I didn't know then: the maze isn't something you escape. I spent years thinking it was. I spent years running, turning corners, hitting dead ends, cursing the architect who designed this particular hell. Then one day—Level Six, maybe, or somewhere between Five and Seven—I realized the maze isn't a prison. It's a process. It's the shape of a life being lived. Every wrong turn teaches you something. Every dead end shows you where not to go next time. Every lost heart is a lesson in what matters and what doesn't.

And the lightbulb moments? They're not answers. They're just better questions.

But I'm getting ahead of myself again. That's my problem. I live ahead of myself, in the future tense, planning exits before I've found entrances. Let me come back to the starting point. To the girl. To the dog. To the sky.

Life fortune I am. That's what I say to myself now, when the corridors get dark and the walls feel close. Life fortune I am. It doesn't make sense. None of this makes sense. But somewhere in the nonsense, in the broken grammar and the misplaced words and the fragments that don't connect, there's truth. There's me. Standing in the first level of a maze I didn't choose, looking for light I'm not sure exists, talking to a dog who's been dead for thirty years.

Sirijus. Are you there?

The maze hums. The walls shift. A corridor opens to the left, dark but not entirely dark. There's something at the end of it, faintly glowing, barely visible. Could be an exit. Could be a trap. Could be neither. Could be both.

I take a step.