A Prayer For Closure

(2008 Intro: I wrote this like five-plus years ago, during early 2003. Looking back I like it a lot, though it was really painful to write. As I recall I was drunk for the whole second half of it.)

“Those who come together for no good reason will part for the same.”
— Chuang Tzu
This is it. No Great American Novel, no scribbled sheet of pseudonyms, no hope to get the point across. Just this. Cheap catharsis and a prayer for closure. None of this story is true.

The basement. My basement. Our basement. The floor is strewn with boxes packed with abandoned plans, forgotten dreams and trash held onto for far too long. The end, if such a thing exists, is waiting for me down there. I see it in my mind’s eye, the entire arc of betrayal and lost promises playing before me like a video in fast-forward. This is how it’s been since it began to end, like I read the script in advance, seeing the future unfold, knowing all the moves beforehand. Knowing the final outcome. And acting anyway. Moving towards the end.

It’s almost over now. The end is nearly upon us. The final stretch of the journey is always the toughest, after you’ve used up all your will and resolve and strength on the miles previous but have a distance yet ahead of you. We’d managed to drive each other crazy, and like frightened and wounded animals we’d begun blindly striking at each other’s weak spots, hoping to deliver the blow that would permanently sever the bond, free us from this path we’d gone down together.

She’s in the basement, of course. Emptying the washer of laundry she’d left soaking there while she was… out. I take a very deep breath and step downstairs. “I’d hoped to save this for when you were ready to leave,” I say, my voice struggling to remain cold and detached. I try and remain unemotional in any confrontation, and this is hardly every confrontation. “But my sister wants to take me to dinner and I don’t have time to wait for you to get your act together.” She tenses slightly at the barb; she has already moved out of this house behind my back and this is just a last-minute sweep for her precious stuff. It’s been a long journey, peeling through layers of deceit like rotten onion, knowing what I would find at the center and begging that please God I’d be wrong this time. The downside to expecting the worst is that there is little more than a grim satisfaction at being proven right. It’s been a long journey, and the most painful one I’ve found myself on, but the terminus is in sight and it’s just a matter of soldiering through a few more miles. By this time I’ve come downstairs and am standing face to face with her.

“The thing is,” I’d said, sitting on the edge of the bare mattress in my old room, my old life, “I’ve kind of been in love with you all this time, and I don’t think I can do the friendship thing anymore.”

I am always performing, even when there’s no one around. I’ve always felt that my life was a third-generation carbon copy of Shakespearean tragedy, and I never hesitate to lift from fiction to enhance my own epic. “It’s the ‘Michael to Fredo’ speech,” I say. “You know how it goes.” The Godfather trilogy had been one of our shared things, maybe. There was so much I obviously never knew, and now there was no point in bothering to try.

“Sweetie—” she starts to say.

“Shut up,” I say, knowing how it hurts her to be told to shut up, furious that she would still call me that after all the confession and revelation upstairs not five minutes earlier. I clench my teeth until it hurts and then continue. “You know how it goes.” Clear throat. “You’re nothing to me now. You’re not a friend, you’re not a lover, you’re not family. You are nothing.” Now comes the finale. I grab her head by the sides, pull it to mine and kiss her violently on the lips. When I let her go she shakes her head and scrunches up her face with bewilderment. Is it possible she doesn’t know, she doesn’t get it? I thought it was a bit too derivative and obvious, but if the point was lost then… then nothing. This was never about her. She never even existed. We’d been two vessels, lost at sea, that had drifted together and thought that it meant something. We’d learned. My time was up here anyway. Finish playing the part and move on. New roles, more challenging, await me.

“I loved you once,” I snarl and head upstairs, already doubting that I ever did.

My sister is waiting on the front porch. “How’d it go?” she asks. My sister is very concerned for me, as is everyone, but not comfortable expressing any emotion, even the emotion of concern.

“With any luck,” I joke through tearing eyes, “I’ve just written myself into her permanent pantheon.” Through the corner of my eye I see her upstairs now, on the phone with someone. Him? Why does it even matter? The end came, the end went, and this is the beginning of something else. The king is dead, long live the king.

But nothing ever ends. Life doesn’t follow the flow of fiction, where all questions wind up answered and all conflicts resolved. Happily ever after, anything ever after, is a downright fraud. Even trying to pattern life after fiction like I had just done offers no true control over the reins of fate. Just easier to make myths about. All the dirt we pile on our ghosts only holds them at bay, and nothing, not even this cheap catharsis, can work a true exorcism. Pray as you might for closure, it never comes.

I light a cigarette and exit stage left, leaving the house and a very large part of me behind when I go.