I want to tell you about my mother and the woman she was before the legends grew up round her, crowding her and me and my fathers and brothers out of her life. The woman she was before the prophecies and songs, the paintings and sculptures, before the emperor kissed her remaining hand and turned an empire towards her and our small clan lost in the forest that is the world. I want to tell you about my mother as I knew her. The woman she was to me.

  My first memories come to me like fluttered eyelids. The world hazy and dreamlike, like none of it was real. Flashes of green and blue, of two suns dancing, of seven moons gawking, of warm hands and the vibrations of her voice resonating through her chest and into me. None of those words are with me anymore. Not even the texture of what they could have been.

  What I remember most clearly of that time before memory is music. Melodies pouring out of my mother and swaying to them in her arms. Rocked on waves made of tones and meandering melodies. The vibrations comforting my tiny body wrapped in her arms. The melody burrowing inside me, planting the seeds of how I would come to know my mother.

  But memory is a failing, flailing thing. It twists and contorts in the telling. I don’t know if these memories I have of her from those days ever happened or if I created them in the intervening years. Perhaps I created them the first time my mother told me how I wailed through the night and all that comforted me was her voice. She told me she sang nonsense. Picking up a word and tying it to another, not in a fashion that made logical sense, but one that made tonal or melodic sense, something she learned from my LoPa. A sonic landscape of language rather than one of meaning.

  She told me she walked along the forest’s edge, bouncing me. Sometimes venturing through the trees, deeper into the forest, to hide my cries from my fathers and brothers, from the few who lived near us.

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  It’s all so real to me. The beat of her heart teaching mine to beat with hers. A heart I would try to follow all my life. A heart that still dictates the tempo of my days.

  I suppose it doesn’t matter if it’s real or creation. Not in the end. Not when there’s so much more to tell.

  But it’s important to me. I wish I could show you what I see when I close my eyes and return to those days that may have never existed. It’s so clear here, inside me, but so hard to describe. If I were you or Ogma, I would know just how to say it, but I’m neither bard nor raconteur. All I can do is put the words out there the best I can and hope it relates enough.

  When I close my eyes, it’s only the two of us, my mother and me, walking through a green hued haze of nightly trees. Leaves caress the skin of my arms and cheeks and legs. The scent of my mother filling my lungs. That indefinable smell that everyone has but no one shares. The scent of her oily skin and coarse hair. She’s in my lungs even now. A smell like love. Like being held through the night while tears batter your chest.

  She didn’t smell like fire or smoke or sulphur. Not yet.

  She smelt like my mother. There’s no better way to describe it. Her scent was powerful, locking out the fecundity of the forest.

  My eyes closed or blurred with tears. My throat ragged from coughing and screaming. But it’s peace that I feel. The memory of pain or frustration or illness echoes at the periphery in a way that makes me understand why it’s just the two of us walking alone through the forest. It’s not far away but just past fingertips. Like the only thing keeping the peace is my mother’s scent, her graceful movements lulling me. And her song.

  Her voice was high and trembling when she sang for me out past the clan’s ears. She struck quiet notes I would never hear in the daylight. Notes so high they wavered at their pinnacle but managed to make it back down to us without shattering or fracturing. Her voice smooth like glass with just the touches of sand at its edges.

  Memory or creation, this is the first memory I have in life. It’s one of the most powerful memories in me.

  For me, it’s where my life begins. It’s how I met my mother.