The Pamphlet of Endings

For the last couple of months, there has been quite the lover’s spite between my writing and I. Perhaps our egos came in between; perhaps my muse wasn’t particularly inclined to make me “bleed” over the paper, like I often hold an obnoxious proclivity to describe it as such.

You see, I had commenced on a journey, both physical and mental, and at the end of either, I have found myself beyond exhausted, my bones broken by the weight of the world I have always carried on my rather fragile and useless shoulders.

I realize it takes courage, takes courage to finally admit today that I am so, so, so very exhausted. Perhaps I can only say this out loud because I have no desire to publish this little piece of writing on any public forum. Maybe that little luxury makes me spill my metaphorical beans.

I had been somewhere between 13 and 14 when I had first desired to be a writer, and that didn’t occur in some grand epiphany. There was, sadly, no drama involved. Just me, an awkward adolescent then, scribbling my heart out in my rather weather-beaten journal, only to realize by the end of the night, that I had actually started writing a full-fledged story instead.

Now that I look back upon it, perhaps I was more of a realist back in the day than I am now. I knew that being a writer wouldn’t be a particularly easy journey; that I would require a stable job, so to speak, to fund my rather arduous literary quest. But somewhere between getting diagnosed with clinical depression and a whole lot of substance abuse (rebellious teenage stands to be my favorite part of my rather young life, till date), I guess I started believing in dreams. I believed that the world had a tiny alcove for dreamers too, frozen in time between all the practical realists that loiter day in and day out of our lives. Maybe that was the first mistake of my ordinary life.

Love has a funny way of finding you in the most inopportune of times. My love stories are interspersed as such, I believe. I do not remember where exactly it all went wrong, with all my “what-ifs” sewn together like a garland of reminders of how truly, irrevocably lonely life is. Was it with the boy who found me too late in life, when he had already found the woman he called his lover, or was it the broken girl whom I constantly sought out to build a home for, even in my brokenness? Whatever be the case, as I sit on a rather dreary day at my favorite café, reminiscing about my incomplete love stories, I cannot help but feel like the picturesque twin of the bejeweled woman who waited for decades, pining for a lover who promised his return. I realize I feel closer to a painting of a fictitious woman in a rather cliché film than any real human I have encountered in my life. Maybe flirting with fiction all my life, instead of staying faithful to my reality, is the second mistake of my ordinary life.

I wish I could tell you my blunders number only to a measly trifecta, but the truth is that I have lost count over the years. Maybe my mistakes have been piling up, one on top of the other, like walls that surround me, hide me, choke me from the world outside. Maybe I waited too long to be called the home to someone’s world, maybe I waited too long to find the world in someone. Whatever be the case, I believe the bricks are the mistakes I made, and the mortar my own regrets. You see, I am quite capable of building a home with my miseries.

So I had decided to run away from it all. Run away until my feet bled, until I crossed borders, until faces changed, until I found a place where no one knew my name. I thought I could outrun my past, I thought I could walk away from my old life, and build something new, but I also realize I am a petty dreamer who believed too much in her storybooks than her singular reality. Perhaps only in books the protagonist is given the luxury to walk away from his/her past and build something new. Perhaps only in books we can find an Edmund Dantes or an Amy Dunne. We are never truly gone, we are never truly changed. We are just effigies of our old half-burned selves.

And now that I have come home again, a little more broken, a little more battered, older, wearier and weighed by the corpses of my dead dreams, I realize that I finally know what endings look like. When I had first scribbled and completed the first draft to my still-unpublished novel, when the last words had fallen off from my mind and into the MS word document, I had thought I had known what endings resembled. I had thought that the peace I had felt was the end of the journey. But the truth is I had only been waylaid into believing sweet-nothings by the childlike euphoria of finishing a story. Stories never end, they live on, sometimes when we trace their spines and read their words off the pages in years to come, and sometimes in just redolence of its memory.

But life does end. Life needs a full stop at the end. And there is no peace there. No closure, no solace, only a raging numbness that threatens to drown you under. Sometimes, you give in, sometimes you fight. Whatever be the case, we always turn into dust buried underneath an ocean. Endings aren’t peaceful, endings aren’t formed of bittersweet smiles and half-lidden eyes. But endings are beautiful, just the same. After all, they always said sunsets are breathtaking, didn’t they?