Chapter 1: The First Stitch of Sound and Silence

That's not quite right. No birthday is a beginning. A birthday is a stitch dropped into fabric already in progress—two people's histories knotting into a third. But I didn't know that then. For a long time, I didn't know much about stitches at all, only that the pattern of my life kept shifting beneath me, rearranging itself into geometries I couldn't quite name, like a quilt squares illusion, the kind where you look once and see order, look again and see chaos, and never can decide which one is telling the truth.

My mother was there, of course. Mothers are always there at the beginning, even when they leave later, even when the leaving is the thing that carves the deepest groove into the record of your life. Her presence at my birth is a fact I carry without memory, a warmth I can't recall but somehow still feel, the way you feel the sun on your face through a closed window. She was my first soundscape. Her heartbeat, her breathing, the particular frequency of her voice lowered to a murmur—all of it was my world before I had words for the concept of world.

Sound, I would learn, is the first architecture. It builds rooms inside you. And silence—silence is the demolition.

I don't mean to start with demolition. I mean to start with the search, because that's what this is, really. A search. People spend their whole lives looking for their grails, and sometimes it feels like nobody can help you find yours. You stand at the edge of whatever your life has become and you think: there must be something holy here, something worth the bleeding. I have stood at that edge more times than I can count, and I have looked down into the dark, and the dark has looked back, and sometimes the dark had a shape I recognized.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The algorithm of a life doesn't run in sequence. It loops. It recurses. It calls itself from within itself, and somewhere in that recursion, meaning accumulates like sediment in a river bend.

Let me try again.

I was born in spring, which in the countryside meant the orchards were beginning their slow, perfumed confession. Blossoms opening like small promises on dark wood. I have no actual memory of this—how could I?—but I have been told, and the telling became its own kind of memory, grafted onto the rootstock of my own experience. This is one of the first things I learned about being alive: that stories told to you about your own beginnings become your memories anyway, soft-edged and unreliable, but persistent as weeds.

My early years were shaped by a landscape that didn't care whether I was listening. Fields and hedgerows and the particular grey of a sky before rain. The rural world has its own tempo, and it does not adjust for you. You either learn to move with it or you spend your childhood feeling like you're walking against a wind that no one else can feel.

I felt that wind.

There were sounds in that landscape I would later learn to miss with an ache that surprised me: the creak of a gate, the particular hollow knock of apples dropping into grass, the way my mother's voice carried from one room to the next, rounding doorframes, softening at the edges. Sound was my first language, the medium through which I understood that I was connected to something larger than myself. And then, gradually, the way a radio tuned too slowly loses the station, the world began to go quiet.

I will write about that later. About the specific, surgical way silence moved through my life, claiming frequencies one by one, like a tide coming in and refusing to leave. For now, I'll say only this: I did not lose sound all at once. I lost it the way you lose a conversation in a crowded room—word by word, syllable by syllable, until you're nodding at shapes of mouths and pretending you understand, and the pretending becomes its own exhaustion.

But before the silence, there was the noise. And before the noise became something to grieve, it was simply my life.

I grew up in a house where schedules ruled. Where the day was portioned into segments, each one measured and accounted for, and deviation was not a concept that found easy purchase. I learned early to live inside a plan. To organize my hours the way my mother organized her kitchen—everything in its place, everything with a purpose, and woe to the thing that wandered. I didn't know yet that this was an illusion of control, a beautifully constructed architecture built on a foundation that was already shifting. I didn't know that plans are prayers said to a god who doesn't answer, not because the god is cruel but because the universe doesn't work that way. It doesn't take requests.

It takes things, though. That I learned.

My mother left. Or was taken. Or simply drifted, the way smoke drifts from a fire that has burned itself down to embers. The specifics are something I will come to, eventually, when I can hold them without my hands shaking. What I can say now is that her absence opened a hole in the architecture of my life, and into that hole poured everything I had been kept from: darkness, uncertainty, the particular vertigo of being the last one standing in a house that was never meant to be empty.

There was a moment—there is always a moment, isn't there, in every memoir, every confession, every quiet admission made to a stranger on a train—a moment when the blood swallowed me. I don't mean metaphorically, or maybe I do, or maybe the distinction doesn't matter anymore. I mean that there was a time when the weight of what had happened, what was happening, what seemed destined to keep happening, pressed in from all sides, and I felt myself disappear into it. Into the red. Into the dark. Into the space between one heartbeat and the next where the algorithm fails and the body forgets how to keep itself alive.

I was alone. Or I felt alone, which at that age, in that state, was the same thing. People search for their grails, and sometimes the search takes you through a country so empty you start to wonder if you invented the grail yourself, if it was ever anything more than a story you told to keep walking.

And then there was Filipe.

I won't say he saved me. That would be too clean a stitch, too neat a seam for a life as frayed as mine was then. But I will say this: when I saw Filipe, I saw someone I recognized. Not a mirror, exactly, but a window into a version of myself that had not yet been swallowed. He was a point of recognition in a landscape that had become illegible to me, and for that—if for nothing else—I have carried his name the way you carry a stone in your pocket: not because it's valuable, but because it's real, and weight, sometimes, is what keeps you tethered to the earth.

There were others. There were presences and absences and the strange, recursive way memory works, folding back on itself so that a face from 2014 surfaces in a dream from 2026 and you wake up unsure which version of you is the dreamer and which is the dream. St. Edmund came to me that way—not as a person, not exactly, but as a point on a map I hadn't drawn yet. A year. 2026. A marker in the distance, or maybe a marker I had already passed and was only now recognizing, the way you pass a sign on the highway and only read it in the rearview mirror, when it's already behind you and the road ahead is something else entirely.

I was still myself, even then. Even in the blood. Even in the dark. I was still the child born on the last day of March, the first day of everything else, and I was still searching.

There was a psychedelic experience. I will write about it honestly, or as honestly as language permits, which is never honestly enough. Language is a terrible translator for the interior. It's like describing color to someone who has only ever known sound. But I will try, because this memoir is, in part, an act of translation—of rendering the invisible visible, the unsaid said, the algorithm of a life into something that can be read and held and perhaps, in the holding, understood.

What I can say about the psychedelic experience is this: it cracked something open. Not broke—cracked. The way ice cracks on a pond in early spring, the fracture lines spreading in patterns that look like destruction but are actually the first sign of thaw. After it, the world was different. Not better, not worse. Different. The way a room is different after you've moved the furniture—same walls, same floor, same light, but the geometry has shifted, and you can't unsee the new configuration. I carried that shift with me the way you carry a scar: not proudly, not shamefully, but as evidence that something happened, that the surface of your life was once breached and what was underneath came up for air.

This is the story of what happened. And what didn't. And the spaces between, where the algorithm hums and the pattern repeats and the grail—if there is a grail—waits to be found, or to be abandoned, or to reveal itself as something you were carrying all along, too close to your eyes to see.

I was born on March 31, 2014. I am still myself. And this is where the story begins, which is to say, this is where I start telling it, which is not the same thing at all, but it will have to do.