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Things begin, and you only realize later that they were happening for a while. You look back, you follow a line to its inception, and if you’re very lucky or very unlucky or if it’s just one of those things that happens, you look ahead and see it where it terminates.
That’s not unusual. This is a world of terminations. The world itself is terminal.
If Daryl was amused by wordplay he might be amused by this. But he isn’t. So he’s not. At least not when it’s that word.
But there are inceptions. There are moments when things come into being. Stars have to come from somewhere, he supposes. At some unknown point in the unknowable distant past, something sparked to life and began to divide. There was an explosion, enormous beyond measure and beyond comprehension, creation so violent it tore everything into being like claws raking open a void and letting the light pour in, and now he’s standing in a prison yard in the firelight and listening to a girl sing.
He’s good at starting fires. It was one of the first things he learned.
He’s never really listened to her sing, this girl. She has, he knows it, but this is the first time she really has, with people around her, quiet and attentive. She’s sung before, half to herself - mostly to herself, really. He knew her as Hershel’s daughter who lost it and cut her wrist open, and he never really made a whole lot more of it to himself than that - not because he regarded doing such a thing with any particular scorn but because it made sense to him.
It made a tremendous amount of sense.
So he did what he does with things like that. He filed it away. Maybe later it would be useful for something. Maybe later it would come up and he could make something out of it that might help. He does these things without intending to, without knowing. He just does them. Habit. Part of him, uncontrolled and mostly uncontrollable.
Like how she sings, or did. Like it’s just something she does. Part of her. She doesn’t need an audience. She is an audience. Doing it for the pleasure of it. Doing it without thought or intention. Another thing he noted, filed away, didn’t think about again.
He’s pretty sure he didn’t.
Watching her now, listening, wondering what he’s supposed to be looking at. The fire, her face, back to the fire again. He has no words for what he’s feeling; he’s not the best with words, but he doesn’t think that’s necessarily the problem here. There just might not be any words. They might not exist.
He closes his eyes and there are dancing sparks.
Here’s what it is: She sings and it’s like a door opens. He has no idea what’s waiting for them inside the prison, and he’s not foolish enough to imagine that whatever’s on the other side of that door will be easy or even good. But this is a different kind of door.
People, the world falls apart and they think about what they lost. They talk about how it used to be. They try to convince themselves it could be like that again. But Daryl never had that, is the thing. They talk about the world that was, and it’s like hearing a fairy tale. This world, this is nothing new. Just one more iteration of the same goddamn thing. Shit after shit after shit.
But this.
He never finished high school. Got told he was stupid a lot as a kid. But part of him thinks maybe he’s not stupid. Part of him thinks maybe that was never true. He spent and spends a lot of time thinking. Working over fine details. Once he heard something about the end of the universe, how there really wasn’t an end at all. There was a Big Bang and then a Big Crunch, everything blowing up and expanding and collapsing in on itself and then doing the whole fucking thing all over again. Over and over.
Somehow that struck him as a pretty shitty way to go about the business of existence.
But this is something else.
This girl who’s singing - he looks at her, her face all lit up like the golden tongue of a flame, and he closes his eyes and sees those dancing sparks and he thinks about a universe that never collapses. That just goes on and on, and the dancing sparks become dancing stars inside his eyelids, and he knows he would get shit for this from Merle, but there were always a lot of the many things he thought which Merle never knew about.
And Merle isn’t here.
But everything else is.
This girl who sings like she can’t not, standing here and listening to her it’s like she’s reaching into his chest, which isn’t a pleasant sensation. It hurts. But he stands here and he takes it, because more than anything it feels like the stretching of a tight muscle. It has the warm, loosening quality of relief, as if a part of him that was twisted up painfully tight is finally uncoiling.
This girl.
And joy be with you all.
She stops.
He files it away.
Later this might not be the singular point of inception. He might look back and see something earlier, or identify something later which seems more significant in hindsight. But stars have to come from somewhere. Universes don’t always begin with a bang.
This is a beginning. A line proceeds from this point and he’ll follow it.
He’ll follow it all the way to the end.