NANOWRIMO 2020

11.24 The End

The end of anything is always bittersweet.

Relationships.

Friendships.

The end of the year. Of seasons. Of love. Of life.

Everything comes to its grand finale at the opera house and we just have to watch it as the curtain closes. The applause dies down. All the lights dim and it's empty.

It doesn't matter if we're ready and it doesn't matter if it'll hurt us. Life marches to the beat of its own drum, us the unwilling passengers.

You can try to get ready. You can read as many books and watch as many films as you can devour in your lifetime. You can walk along a sunset river and you can watch the leaves shed their bright colors and fall to earth in a shiver and a sigh. You can do everything you can.

And it will still hurt. Of anything in this world that I can promise you, I promise you that.

Pain.

It's a love of its own, in its own twisted way.

It might be a spear. Finely sharpened and expertly handled. Delicately shoved into your chest slowly so that it is a slow burn of pain and grief and you never realized when it first touched your skin.

This pain is fine, you may think. This is bearable. But then the ache continues and builds until its overwhelming, all consuming, destructive inherent in its nature.

And you will want it to end.

Any means of bargaining to make it stop oh god please make it stop.

But it won't. It will never end. It may dull and soften. But it will always be with you, scar tissue left to rise and blister and harden over time.

For that specific grief, of moments of sadness, your grief is a ball trapped in a box with a trigger. At the beginning, the ball is massive and fills the space with greed. Every little jostle is a stumble into the trigger and another wave of hurt. Constant, never-ending hurt.

That, I promise.

But I also promise that the ball chafes against the box and becomes smaller over time. It may take days, weeks, or years, but the ball will stop toggling the trigger as frequently so that the pain will resurface, but only as a memory, a distant echo of a hurt we drowned in and no longer wish to feel, but is still very much a part of us.

So many little boxes of hurt and discontent we keep within ourselves.

Don't stack them too high that you can't see above them. Then you will truly be lost and the way out of the maze will be nigh impossible because you built the labyrinth blindly and with emotion. There will be deadends and false hope. The end farther than if you had released them.

Let yourself grieve, my child, for that is a part of life that we cannot escape. It is what makes us human and fallible, but it is what makes this life worth living.

If we never hurt, we could never appreciate the love. If we never lost, we could never live.

It's a balancing, spinning top and we are veering on the surface, never scratching too deep, revolving around similar hurts and loves and beginnings and endings. All too much but never enough.

Does that make sense? Why this pain is so much, but only temporary?

It brings us closer to our true selves, a learning experience over a lifetime that takes decades to complete, and even as your last breath whispers from your lips, you may not have come to peace with it.

I hope that you will make peace with it. I never could. Most people don't. The hurt, the crucifying existence of being. It wears you down.

And sometimes days will blend together and life will lose all meaning.

But here is a little secret I shall let you in on:

The only meaning of life, is what we make of it. It is our dreams and our hopes. Our never-ending desire to find something else, something new, something beautiful. The pursuit of art or technology. The hunger to discover and learn.

Do not lose that drive, even on your darkest days. It may seem impossible, it may seem idealistic. But this life is oh so short, and you've already lived most of it in a trance, following orders and trudging along to time's march of mayhem.

But we are here talking. That is something is it not? That is your unwillingness to give up, to let this be the end. So don't let it end.

Keep going.

I'm rooting for you, even when you are not rooting for yourself. And hopefully, the next we meet, you will have learned something in your time alive and you can spin me your yarn of wisdom and experience.

I hope this makes sense. In due time it will. But for now, you must leave.

Now you must continue.

You said that you were trapped. Stuck. Unable to go left where nothing is right, nor right where nothing is left but I do implore you: go forward.

That is all that any of us can do.

Yes.

Next time, I hope we will meet under better circumstances.

But as you very well know.

The end of anything is always bittersweet.