first words last words

If words matter, which ones. The infant's inaugural sounds that grown-ups assign warm-hearted meaning to? She said mama! He said mama!? Hear it? No. Yeah. They said dada! They said momma dada nana poppa sissy bruth cuz booboo coocoo. Or maybe it was really a smart-aleck bit of gibberish that only the baby understood. Or a Dadaist manifesto. Try: gimme gimme love gimme love more love gimme shelter gimme more attention gimme dryness milk food more more now now quicker. 

And last words. Will they be an aphorism, an epigram, a saying that all by the bedside can later quote. Words bronzed in your heart, branded into memory. A word or phrase tinged with wisdom, bitterness, humor, irony, brilliance, mysticism, holiness, profanity, vulgarity, vanity, regret, gratitude, humility, pride, inspiration. Love. Generosity. Surrender. Personality. Or something else. Or else nothing. The long metallic note the roshi sounds at the end of the meditation session. The aural pebble in the oceanic roar, echoing infinitely into indescribable ineffable silence. Last words. (Google them. Good search topic. If Google even exists then. If AI has not replaced human or humanoid speech.)

What about between the two, what about the myriad or myriads times millions of words spoken (or merely imagined) between that alpha and this omega, between the first terminus and the last, between the first gurgled garbled mewlings, the oral scribblings and doodlings, at the departing station and the broken mumblings, screams, or ringing emptiness sounded at the last stop, the train's brakes screeching to a halt, the steam billowing upward, a stock movie scene. What about all those words, between A and Z (or whatever your language's alphabet begins and ends with, or whatever your private idiosyncratic memory consists of). The unimaginable flood of syllables strewn, streamed, leaked, and hurled, secreted or sworded, all untakebackable.

First words.

Last words.

In-between words.