I Know the End

of endings with no beginnings

I think I've seen this film before
And I didn't like the ending
I'm not your problem anymore
- Taylor Swift, “Exile”

Sometimes you’ll see the end of something coming; it’s inevitable. Books end, movies end, baseball season ends. You know this going in and you’re prepared for it. Other things you’re not so prepared for. Your favorite deli has closed down. A beloved tv show is canceled. Your marriage ends.

I didn’t know the end was coming. Oh, there was some unhappiness. There was depression brought on by a pandemic, there was a lot of sighing, a lot of complaining that we couldn’t go anywhere, do anything together. There was a growing boredom that comes from sitting in the same room together every day for months at a time without promise of that changing. It was a vague, blameless unhappiness that I thought would stagnate then dissipate once we were able to get out of the house together. We just had to wait it out.

Except it got too big for him; the unhappiness enveloped him until he felt like he had to do something, and that something was to take flight. I never saw it coming. I had no idea the end was near and I was so unprepared for it I spent two days in a state of shock, an accident victim who keeps going back to the seconds before the wreck happened, when all I knew was a sense of complacency, a quiet settlement that we both agreed to without saying it out loud, that we’d wait this out. In the thirty seconds it took to announce that the end was here, my life unraveled. Everything after that time is now marked as post-end. There is the before. There is the after. And there is that moment in our living room that squeezes between the two, a bridge from a life I was gladly living to a life I don’t want.

I anticipate ends. I prepare myself for them. And I console myself with the fact that with ends, there are beginnings. There are new books to read, another baseball season down the road, other tv shows to watch. What’s left when a relationship ends, though? What is there too look forward to? There is just the end, a steep drop off a cliff, the flight through the air, the crash landing. You lay there, emotionally bruised and battered, your heart in pieces, and you’re thinking, what’s next? What do I do now? And you come up with nothing, no answers, no urgency to find those answers. You just want to stay at the bottom of the cliff, dazed, broken. It’s an ending without chance of renewal. There is no going forward.

I keep thinking that if I had a hint the end was coming, I’d be better off. And then I wonder if the signs were there but I just refused to see them. I think back, reminisce, and that’s when I notice the blemishes I did not see before. Or maybe I saw them and pushed them to the back of my mind, forgotten tidbits of life that rest in the dark recesses where things like old phone numbers and rules to games I haven’t played in dozens of years reside and gather dust. I hid them under the detritus of memories so as to keep them out of the way in a place where I’d never have to address them or talk about them.

It’s a great disservice to myself and to us that I did that. But his unhappiness was not on the periphery like mine; it was blatant, unyielding. There should have been a revealing moment when he said he was looking for solutions, for answers. Instead there was a gulf of silence and the noise of broken glass as he announced the end. In my mind, a movie screen was pulled down, a cartoon head popping into view to shout “that’s all folks,” and then a cut to black. There was no talking. There was no compromise. There was just the end.

I was left to stare at an empty couch, to confront an empty space where fourteen years existed. I was left to contemplate the end on my own as the door shut behind him. I was left with an ending I was unprepared for. I thought this movie would go on forever, but how long can frame after frame of nothingness hold interest? I should have seen, I should have known. The end was always near, it always is. It’s too soon to look for beginnings. I don’t think I’ll find them anyhow.

No, I'm not afraid to disappear
The billboard said, "The end is near"
I turned around, there was nothing there
Yeah, I guess the end is here

The end is here
-Phoebe Bridgers, “I Know the End”