An End, Once and For All

One time, I was told that a beautiful song was not so beautiful when you looked closer.

The endings were always hardest,
we agreed once,
lying on a rock near some waterfalls
mid-March, wind and sun,
picnic basket and rainbow kite that wouldn’t fly.

I was talking about Inheritance,
and you were talking about some
mysterious book series you loved
that I have since forgotten the name of,
like you.

The endings were hard,
I suggested, because
we as humans never want love to end,
so when we are doubtlessly, fervidly
in love with a book,
it ends with heartbreak,
and a longing for what once was.

You said no, that couldn’t be it,
and rambled off into some long-winded excuse
for paper and ink
and the caprice of human emotion,
while I sat naïve
of our own futures being written in those moments.

Memories wander,
and I thought often of
your large words and larger ego.
“Immortalization” was a word you threw around
like a game of fetch;
and I was the hound, expected
to pick up your high-hoven gauntlet
and return to you each time.

I began seeking through books that summer,
plucking them daintily off the shelves
at the dusty library I practically lived at
and flipping to the last few pages
just
to read the endings.

I began to love the endings:
the knowledge of happiness at the end,
without the complications in the middle
or the emotional attachment from the start.
The endings delighted me,
and I spent hours each day just daydreaming about
the heartache or danger or deceit or mortality
I had skimmed to reach
my happiness.

Not so hard to believe,
then, that I would wonder about
my own ending.
Dramatic, exultant, artless, gruesome?
I never knew,
I only prepared for anything.

Once, as I leaned against you,
drowsy on a winter’s night,
you explained the game you were playing.
This song sounds beautiful,
you explained then,
but it is sad.
You said that it was when the hero
that you had put all your effort into
finally reached his end.

I saw a sliver of mortality in you that night
that I had never seen before, or since,
visible only as a sliver of a tear sparkling
on the crescent edge of your lashes.
And the song was beautiful to me,
having never played the game,
and as you swallowed pain and loss,
I smiled and hummed to the haunting dirge.

                            ~

Ours was the story of love and fantasy,
lies, betrayal, worry,
late nights and early mornings and
nights spent awake listening to you snore
as the moon moved in millimeters
and the darkness crept in between us.

Ours was the tale of clocks spinning backwards,
blue boxes and red roses, companionship,
friends without direction, only love, only time:

And, truly,
ours was the most beautiful ending.