The Habit

Most want to get the full story. I don’t. Not a preference, though no matter how much I wish it were, it was an habitual instinct to dig in against neat closings. Because the truth of the matter was, none of us usually got even our own full story. It would end. Abruptly, likely confusingly, terrifyingly, and it would end. We’d not like it either way. We’d barely have time to think about it. Perhaps a thought of the unfairness, or the pain. It’s why I hated writing them. The end. Two words that held the smallest accomplishment and eventually the world’s demise in the space between them. Time would draw the line. At least, that’s how it worked for most people; for me, sometimes, it froze in my mind. That felt less like an ending and more like preservation. More fickle and impertinent than death, perhaps. The audacity it had to keep surviving when all else would fade. Time is rejecting all of our hopes and plans. Time is rejecting our earnest endeavors, steamrolling over things that were beautiful, like a child smashing things out of spite. I take out the pen, my favorite that’s held all my non-endings.

I take my cup of coffee, still steaming, add sugar and almond milk, and go stand by the kitchen table, looking out the window. I don’t want to write today, it’s too bright, far too bright for the things that need endings today. But today is an end day. I glance at the pen on the scratched oak surface. The one holding it. It’s all in there; my eyes glance up to my kitchen table. Journals, for which I didn’t finish the entries. The half-sentences at the end were because I’d set the pen down mid-thought. Too tired to finish it, thinking it wasn’t that important for an ending. So my thoughts didn’t need a finale either. I take another warm sugary sip, and my gaze goes to the other notebooks and laptop.

Now, those were the real problems. Stories in those. So many things, I’d never added the ending. Maybe they weren’t important either. Maybe ending them kept them breathing, just there, in the shelves and on the table, in my mind. Unfinished loves and lives, stories suspended in amber, preserved all the potential. Sometimes, looking back, when I’d had the courage to show others these works and heard myself say “That’s not what I meant” after they tried to tidy it up. Or I’ve looked at a snippet of a story and thought with a sigh, “that went sideways” – though I would usually like those better. I like to think of them in my own life, revisiting them, going back in time to each stamp to examine how I felt that day, how I felt worthy or blessed enough to change the outcomes. One day, maybe I needed that character to crash out until they were unloved. Another day, maybe I needed a certain character to be held until they finally, finally understood what whole might feel like. I didn’t understand those who needed closure. Did they not know what closure actually was? Oh, how to be able to accept that final shuttering. I take a notebook out and open it up, just to check. To make sure it was still holding its value, even though it was unfinished. I lay it out on the table and open it to:

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“The pain in my side had left me breathless and shaky against the stone wall in the alley. I waited only a few moments before walking out onto the sidewalk. I thought I had been hiding the fact that I was hurt until I stumbled and fell against a wall again. Then I saw out of the corner of my eye a figure heading towards me.”

One of my earlier tries at a manuscript. A part of me felt a bit weird with it. The fact that I liked it like that, something suspended, was antithetical to all of human existence. To all existence.

“Maybe it was greed?” I think, and take another sip. I wanted more, more scenes, more relationships, more possibilities. Not from greed per se, from the dread of taking all those choices away. My choices, the readers (if I ever get there), the characters. No ending meant no ending to those, either. No stopped loves, no family’s fractures, nothing that couldn’t just… continue if I willed it. There could still be another pouty look, another deep inhale in those characters’ breath, still one more frustrating day, still the sour stomach before the world-altering decisions, still all could go back and be rewritten at any time. I wanted more. More time. That’s what it always boiled down to. I wanted it all to suspend with me until I had no choice but to end. Where I didn’t have to dictate it or worry about it. They were just all still open, in the end.

Then I drink my coffee down to half, and I’ve already picked up the pen as I’d been thinking. I’d been doodling on the notepad. Just along the edges, the lines still needed to be filled in. Another wave of unease washes over me as I look at the books on the shelves above the laptop and notebooks. I didn't like to finish those either. The ringing started at that. I can’t remember when I started not wanting to finish books. When I was younger, I’d read 600 pages a night if I could get away with it, if it was that good. My eyes drift down to the 300-page paperback I’ve been nursing for 4 months now.

​I sit down with the pen, the one holding this ending, and I put it to the small pad of paper by the coffeemaker. The bright yellow and green border is obscene in its cheerfulness for the words that start to flow out of the pen. “Moira Ann Wright, born April 14, 1990, beloved sister,” A pause, thinking I should write “beloved daughter” first. But our parents weren’t here, I am, at the end, that’s still flowing from the pen. “Succumbed to…” I scratch that, this dumb thing. We’re not doing that; my sister never succumbed to anything in her life. She fought, anything and everything. Not in the way these stupid, pretty words frame it; not right. She was a fighter in the sense that she’d swing on a full-grown man and fought against the world as hard as I did. It was only the cruel luck of the draw that I was the one here.

I now understood why my grandmother’s obituary had been so clinical, so cold. My aunt, a published author with two full books under her belt, had written it. Because she was the writer in the family. I now understood the stark obituary for what it was. A task, when the ending still hung in the air. Not a daughter fully settling the reality of being without her mother. An ending that had not been fully accepted yet. Rushed. The words flow, then the pen backs up, scribbles out, highlights things, the words come into and out of blurry focus, the pen pulling the ending out of me and I don’t want this ending to be a task. I wanted that pen, that’s ending it all, to put the right words down, so that when people read this, they wouldn’t read it as a regurgitation of my sister’s life, where she worked, who she was from, what she contributed to society. It’s her ending, and I’m forced to hold the pen that writes it. I can hear her voice mocking me if I try to put all those polite things in, and also genuinely balk at it if I put too much, because she was a private person. I held the pen at the end. The end of her. But how dare she? She left me alone to write it. And I don’t feel like I can put all of her into this. So, it ends, and not how either of us wants it.

“Moira Ann Wright, born April 14, 1990, beloved sister, daughter, and mother. Fought and lost her second brief round of cancer with family around her…” The task is complete. To those who could see it for what it was, the stark listing of my sister was grief that I could never, with a thousand years, put an end to. And at the very end, a note.

“You have to read her stories elsewhere.” I pen my name, as she would be in all my unfinished stories. I didn’t like endings, after all. ​

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