The Explainable Goodbye

[COMPLETED]

"No such thing as happy endings," she said twirling her perfect hair around her finger.

"How so?"

"You end up alone, or you die. Eventually everyone dies, so some people experience both. Happy is a very sickening word."

"We're in high school," I point out.

"I know. But this is the time to think of the future," she lets go of her hair and sits thinking. Maybe of the future.

"What about after high school?" I'm afraid it'll bring up a conversation we both don't want to have. What will happen to us? Will we end too?

"I like to think of high school as the end sometimes. We can never know what to expect after. We just look forward to graduation for now. You know in the movies after everything is over? Then the music with the credits comes on? And you think wow that was a good movie, and you don't even pay attention to what song is playing. It's silent as far as you can tell. It's a deafening silence without there actually being silence."

"How does that relate to high school?" I ask.

"At the end we all throw our caps up in the air and cheer. We cheer that we graduated. But no one ever thinks of it as the end. It will be silent, but there will never be any silence."

"The deafening silence," I say.

"That signals the end," she finishes my thought.

"The end of everything we knew," we both go quiet ending the conversation.