Beginning

Green snake coiled around a tree branch
Photo by David Clode

In the beginning language was a garden.

Adverbial seedlings pressed to skywardly split the rocky infinitives. It was a cleft construction, that ravine, which brought forth the progressive aspect of waterfall, which was flowing, which was churning, which was bursting with verbal enthusiasm.

Its mist kissed the brave budding morphemes, fixed on stems and roots of meaning, deriving new ideas from the loamy depths of a forgotten protolanguage.

A snakelike syntax stretched around human bodies to make membranes of personhood. Possessive determination shaped our infamous expulsion. What was never our garden before was even less our garden now, so we left to shape a new language, a new beginning.

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