Begin, Began, Begun

Most of life happens in the third form - the one that cannot stand alone.

Begin is a door. Began is a memory, closed and quiet, sufficient unto itself. But begun needs something to lean on. It cannot exist without a hand beneath it - has, have, had. It is always still happening, always waiting on what comes next.

We spend our youth in the first form, sure we are choosing. We spend our grief in the second, certain it is over. But the truest things live in the third: the love that has begun and is not finished, the change that had already begun before we noticed, the self we have begun to become and cannot yet name.

Begun is the tense of what is underway. It asks only one thing of us - to keep holding it up.