Once free of the shell, once you are hatched, so to speak, all things begin. Horizons, which before had been immediate, called down upon your body and your senses like a blanket, remove themselves to a proper distance and objects come into focus. You are still not capable of registering them at first as anything more than what they appear to be, you are not able to weave them into a fabric with a beginning, a middle, and something approximating an end, but that point is approaching and it will likely catch you off guard when it arrives, though afterwards you will explain to your friends and acquaintances (more of the latter than the former, unfortunately) that you had an inkling, a foreboding ahead of time and you might have done something to prevent the arrival of this fully-formed world and your ability to comment on it, to make at least a modicum of sense of it, if you had known what would happen, the unpleasant consequences, and if, of course, you hadn’t become so lazy in the meantime, so apt to trust providence to do what it does according to its sterling reputation. No one will believe you, of course. They will remark that nothing has actually changed, that you are, in every respect, exactly the same degenerate you were before the supposed advent of the supposed world, of the horizon and everything that populates space between you and it. In my own attempt to postpone such criticism, to throw it off track the way you throw salt over your shoulder to ward off what we refer to as bad luck because we can’t completely wrap our minds around the concept of there being neither luck nor design nor chaos, I stumble down a path first worn in this part of the forest by wild hogs, I suppose. I have been warned of their presence by no fewer than four different people, none of whom seemed prone to exaggeration, though I can’t remember the last time I have seen so much as a photograph of a hog in a newspaper or a magazine. Eulalie says sometimes things go missing from your consciousness so thoroughly it is as if they never really existed in the first place, and when you happen upon them again by accident later, the shock is identical to that you might experience upon being told that the people you had grown up believing were your parents are not really your parents at all, but cousins of the same or even complete strangers. In either case, there is a sudden tear in the fabric of the universe as you have experienced it to that point – or more precisely, as you have endeavored to stitch it together -- and the danger is that you will lose your balance in your attempt to examine that tear more closely, and you will fall right through.