It was raining when he was born. This is the only thing he can remember.

He watches light move on the low buildings on the other side of the courtyard, and he watches people walk slowly through the hallways inside them. This is important somehow, and he tries to remember why. He realizes someone is talking to him. He turns his attention to the conversation. The man talking was in the middle of a sentence. He tries to put together what was being said, and turns to the window again.

He watches the light move on the low buildings on the other side of the courtyard, and he watches people sit at windows and gaze out through the glass, mostly at nothing, sometimes back at him. This is important somehow. It was raining. Not now, though. It was raining when he was born. Someone is talking. He turns to the conversation, in the middle of it.

He turns in the middle of it and listens to his brother, sun in his eyes, feet in the freezing cold water. His brother is explaining something. He believes his brother when he is told that there is nothing more to the stream than this. There is only this between the tall slim trees there, and the large rocks there that are too big for them to climb. He believes him, accepts it, but still wonders about it.

He watches the sun on the windows across the courtyard. The reflecting light is coming into the room he is in, striking his face full on. He wonders how his eyes look, the edges of his irises desperately trying to touch, to make a tiny black speck. A impossibly small singularity, ignoring gravity.

He jumps off the garage with a bath towel tied around his neck. He believes he can fly. He believes he can fly and he does. He remembers flying. He remembers how it feels to step out and not fall. He remembers lifting a foot as if climbing a stair, only stepping into the blankness. He turns his attention to the conversation. He tries to put together what he missed so that what is being said now will make sense, but it’s hard. He’s missed too much of it already.

It is raining. He scrawls illegible text all over the baseboards of the house in tiny print, and only when no one is looking. When he finishes, he’ll be able to float over the floor and not be bothered with actually making contact with the linoleum. He watches light move on the low buildings on the other side of the courtyard.

He is alone in his apartment, rain sliding down the window, hunched over a keyboard. He is alone. The cursor blinks on the screen at the end of a document. He leans back, exhausted. Nothing to the stream but what you can see. No memory but what you can see before you. The people he births in his story live and die while he is sitting there. Someone is talking to him, stroking his hair. He watches people sit in chairs at windows and he knows them all.

Someone is talking to him. They talk about something growing inside him. He knows about this already. He’s been populating it his entire life. He’s been filling it with people, stories, scenes, conflicts, drama, landscapes, love, countries, entire worlds, all populated and conceived in his own mind. They are all his and not his. He can’t remember where the shore is. He is too far out. The sun is directly overhead. There are no waves. He just floats there. He watches the sun move across the buildings like it moves across the water, stretched out, warped, distended. He watches it and he floats. He populates his country.

Something growing in his head. He caught that much. It is small and bright and round and shows white on the ghost-like grey sheets they have on the wall. Of course he understands. He watches the light inside his mind grow, perfectly round, perfectly bright, like a sun, like the edges of a little universe, expanding after an explosion.

He watches it move overhead and just lays there, suspended by the water. He knows that this is all there is. He populates his dreams with people, nodding to them as they pass his borders. His brother, tan and shirtless, throwing rocks. The people he remembers that soak into the baseboards of his room. The water laps at the round thing and blurs the edges. It moves its roots inside him. Someone is talking to him, holding his hand, stroking his hair, crying. No hard lines as the sun tip-toes through hallways, touching doorknobs, opening curtains, cupping old faces with soft hands. These people slip into his world, past the borders, shedding citizenship. His world grows.

This is all he remembers from when he was born.