It started in dark, it ended in dark.  All darks were there at some point.

It started in the dark, then there was light, then more dark.  It was warm and then cold, the warmth returned but never lasted as long as he wanted.  There was a binding on my body so he could not move.  Not tight bands, an all over cocoon.  Someone spoke and he listened, even then he knew what was being said, the tone, the emotion.  Later he knew the words.

It really started before the dark.  There was before that a half-remembered time.  Very warm and cosy.  A diffused, soft, light for most of that time.  He could not do more than stretch feebly and then there was the rhythmic noise.  Slow drumbeats that increased in tempo sometimes before settling back into that well known rhythm.  There were other sounds, hard to hear but there.  Maybe they were words, the sounds of birds singing or of machinery and wheels turning.  He could not be sure.  Music was there.  Enticing and half heard.  Sometimes louder and bolder, making him excited or scared in turns.

There was no time.  There was the now and what went before did not exist.  What was to come was only more now.  Sometimes that was enough, the now.  He was aware of changes, of growth of something happening to me but he did not know what.  He felt, or thought that he felt, movement, not the outside movement, not the movement beyond the suffused pink glow that he could feel rather than see.  Movement that was him, not just an arm or legs stretching, hands opening and closing, a movement of him. 

He had no words then and now he wonders how he remembers this time at all.  Without words the thoughts were just thoughts, not formulated, codified and edited to fit the words.  The thoughts were just there, hanging in his head.  Sometimes two thoughts would merge, become one.  One thought, one feeling, one minor disturbance as the now continued its oddly serene process of becoming another now. 

He did not think that he was there all the time.  There were many nows that he missed.  There was a recognition that he had missed them.  The now that was now was not the same as the now he had left.  This happened often.  He did not know if that worried him.  He did worry about missing nows after the dark started.

He liked this series of nows.  he liked the warmth, the comfort.  He liked listening to the words and music and birds.  He even liked the grating noise of machinery.  He thought that he understood some of the noise, felt reassured by some of it.  He came to recognised patterns in the sounds.  There was a comfort in the pattern of the sounds.  There was a comfort in realising that he understood this world of mine.  There was a comfort in the warmth.  He did not think that he had been really warm since.  He did not think that he had really felt comfort since.

This was not the start, it was more like the end.

Then she died and he thought that he was happy.

He did not remember the woman who birthed him.

Which is odd because he remembers everything.