Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-07-22 - 9:20 a.m.

Wrapping It Up

This month I have been in the middle of ending a treasured relationship. I haven't written about it here, for that reason. The middle of the ending is the place where you still have some peripheral crazy hope that it isn't the end at all, that there will be a "to be continued" and another volume, that you will suddenly look at each other and say, "This is crazy; let's go back and go down some different path."

Now we are at the end of the ending.

I'm not good with endings. I never have been. I don't often read short stories, because there are so many endings, so fast. Novels are safer. I can relax. If I read short stories, I flip through them to gauge their length first. I don't like endings that arrive without warning.

But then, I don't like endings that arrive with warning, either.

If I get a pair of shoes I really like, I worry that they'll wear out. I think about that on the first day that I wear them. "These are great shoes; too bad I can't have them forever." I wonder if someone took something I loved from me, when I was very young. I don't remember.

I have shirts in my closet that I haven't worn for twenty years. It doesn't matter; I keep them. They may be neither "beautiful nor useful", but the act of letting them go would be a struggle. The act of keeping them, the non-act, is effortless.

This man sent me flowers often. I like flowers, but they're ephemeral. They die. They die pretty fast, in my hot little house. I don't like it when they die, and I never take care of them in a timely way. I'm always cleaning out old vases with that powerful sulphur soup in them. Guilt soup. Another thing not taken care of, another thing gone. Maybe if I'd clipped the stems, changed the water - maybe if I never wore those shoes at all -

The worst thing about endings is that they sometimes make a lie of the middles. You have to go back and look at things in a new way: "Oh, when I was thinking it was THIS way, you were -" Like a trick ending to a mystery story - you have to think back, see where you were led to believe something different. "I thought you thought this way about me -"

And now, I can't even end sentences.

Endings should be graceful. They should wrap up the loose ends, answer all the questions, satisfy. Human endings don't. They're raggedy and unsatisfying. They happen too quickly and they take much too long. And they hurt. Oh, God, they hurt.

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