How to Start a Memoir

by Dylan Boyer

Say something about biography, something about the fault lines of memory or some horseshit about the shifting of sands. Insert here the opening line of Anna Karenina in quotations; cite the citations of Ada. Begin with a commanding, authorial presence, a postmodern joke, or a convoluted remark attempting to express a half-thought on memory and form, on how we’ve all become our own stenographers reading our most intimate trials into digital spaces to live as electricity forever. Or something like that. The world gets smaller, and we are losing track of time, or simply transforming the manner in which it’s kept; where once we kept time in the air, measuring it with gears on our wrists and in our pockets – small machines intricately crafted to give structure to this waking dream by means of the perfectly nestled clicking of their teeth – may we now find time as we find a current of water (for time is thicker than air, we now know – history may be gaseous but time you can swim in), or else as a hand gently gripping ours as one would a child’s, the skin rough with wrinkles and callouses and scars but not frail of bone or muscle, its fingers intertwining with our own as it guides us gently yet firmly through the infinite night of a nameless desert, where our only consolation is that maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll be able to see the stars.

About the Author: Dylan Boyer

Dylan Boyer is a writer and an MFA graduate. His work has appeared online at Drunk Monkeys, The 96th of October, and CaféLit. In July of 2022 he independently published a collection of fiction titled This Slo Motion Apocalypse. He is at work on his second novel as well as a memoir.