8/08/02: End of a Thousand Ends
All I wanted was an ending worthy of the middle. A bad ending ruins the whole thing. And even worse is the ending that is not an end, the ending that you didn’t notice until later you say, “Well, I guess that was the end. I wish I had known it at the time.”
Or maybe the worst is the ending that came a thousand times, like the death by a thousand cuts. The end was that time at Omonia café when I touched his arm and I realized it was a parody of a movement I had made a thousand times before and it didn’t mean what it used to mean. The end was before that, when he left and I breathed a sigh of relief. The end was before that, when I was crying in the bathroom when he just wouldn’t say it out loud that he still wanted me, even though he knew I needed to hear it. Because he knew I needed to hear it. Because it wasn’t true.
The end was when he stopped caring about what he cooked for me. The end was when he didn’t cook for me anymore at all. The end was when we didn’t sit at the table after dinner anymore. The end was when we didn’t eat at the table anymore. The end was when I got a job. The end was when I told him to stop wearing my socks.
The end was when he got so drunk that time it was like he was a stranger, and I told him to go back to New Jersey, and he said he would go if I really wanted him to, and I held the moment in my hands like a thin statue made of glass, and I could have thrown it on the floor and shattered it but instead I wrapped it in a blanket and told him to come back to bed, and he wouldn’t lie down, he just sat up and stared at the clock until he said he didn’t know what I wanted from him, and the truth was I didn’t want anything in particular, just to go to sleep.
Or maybe the end was when he came back from Greece and left for Michigan and didn’t call me or email me. Not once. Not to say hi, not to say bye, not to say give me back my stuff. I guess he didn’t want it, not his A+ paper on my fridge, not the card I gave to him on Valentine’s that was addressed to “My Puppy, Left Side of Bed, Under White Blanket, NY,” not the cashmere sweater he lost the first night he spent at my house, not the ties he said he’d get next time, the last time he was there.
But no, the real end was this, last night, when I found myself playing the Bitter Boogie, and singing it to him. I added a coda: "After everything that happened, you're wondering if I love you. Baby if you drowned at sea, I'd love the sea above you," and then I put the guitar down and cried. Because it wasn't true.