the night we met

The night we met, I have been thinking a long time about those words, about writing them down at the beginning of a sentence, and now that I have written them down at the beginning of this sentence I realize I still do not know how the rest of the sentence beginning with those words should go, how I should go on writing the sentence beginning with those words. It seems to me that writing that sentence would begin the story, and by beginning the story I would also be ending the story, or at least signaling the end of the story, because a story with a beginning must also have an end, while a story encountered in medias res need only go on, can be expected to go on, without beginning or end. This I suppose is why one would choose to begin writing in the middle, and though I might signal the end, I have not written the end, and by avoiding the beginning and the end I remain writing in the middle of the story, a story I am no longer certain I have the courage to write, a story that seems to me requires more courage to write than to live as it has been lived, as it is being lived; to write the story is to stop living it, and to stop living a story sometimes requires more courage than to continue living the story.

Rather than continue writing, I have begun reading what I have written, everything I have written, trying to understand the relationship between everything I have written and the story I am writing, the story I have been trying to write. I have started writing between the parts that have already been written, shifting a paragraph here and there, removing some parts completely and restoring others that I had removed as soon as they had been written, which are then filed away elsewhere rather than discarded completely, creating a series of bifurcations and interpolations, following each bifurcation and interpolation in the way of Roubaud, but only keeping these bifurcations and interpolations, these departures from this writing, for myself, as though they might hold answers to questions I have not yet thought to ask, or have asked but do not yet recognize as questions that I have asked or need to ask. Everything in this writing exists in the gaps of the story, in spaces the story has left behind or has created, or has revealed to have always existed before and after the story. They exist outside the concentration of events that comprise the story I am writing, am trying to write, and this is the way I have found to continue both living and writing the story. This is how I have chosen to write; perhaps this is how I have always chosen to write, how I have always been able to write, how I can now write the sentence that begins