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Dear Closure,
You ambiguous creature, why do you haunt me with your expectations? Why are you so tantalizing but at the same time so repellent? Why do I crave and fear you? What is wrong with me that I’d rather prolong the torture of being unheard or unknown rather than the pure, deafening, too bright spotlight of honesty that you usher into my universe?
In writing, you are the last line written and the last scene read. You are the death of characters, the exit of another world, and the wincing acceptance that whatever is written before is good enough to be complete. Thus, the implication is, whatever is written is good or, at least, the best that could be. You become the ultimate test of talent, shaky hands handing in a sweaty sheet of paper in full sacrifice with needling worry of what is not yet done. The result is a multitude of red squiggles of someone else’s closure of rearranging sentences, re-spelling words, and omitting, extraneous, commas, until, it, is, readable. That. That. That which.
In life, I don’t even recognize you because you are cloaked in anxiety and love simultaneously. At your most innocent you are the release of a voluminous belch. At your most mature you are the acceptance of loss, the burning of pictures, all the stages of grief, and the start of a completely new way of living. In your maturity you grasp at the neck and say, “If you do not want to die choking then stop breathing.” You break people. You fix people. And I suspect you laugh all the while.
When ignored, Closure, you become an insolent child. You chew on people’s insides and come to them in the middle of the night during sleep to poke them until their limbs flail and they find themselves online to drown you out with cat videos and Instagram. You like to see people naked. You like to watch as they stand in front of the fully clothed and are pointed at. Then, like a benevolent god, you offer them another closet of clothes that they have no choice but to don or forever be ridiculed for their nudity.
My therapist says closure is like the closing of a flower in the morning, and I think he’s right. Imagine the most beautiful thing in the world, so beautiful that it hurts to look at it. It stings your eyes but you can’t stop staring. And then imagine it closing and you feeling the relief but also the yearning to see it again no matter the pain. I think that’s what you are, Closure. You are not just the end of something but the yearning for it despite the discomfort. You are not good. You are not bad. You are the truth that keeps us insane but hopeful or sane but hopeless.
I hope when next we meet you are gentle with my exposed skin and I can slip on the dress you give me, forget the last flower I saw, and write the best last line ever without any regret.
Sincerely,
Me
-E.M. Green
E.M. Green is a 32 year old woman from Knoxville, TN. She fashions herself to be a writer in the same way that the Velveteen Rabbit fashioned himself to be a real rabbit. Hopefully her story will end up much like his. E.M. also works as a grocer so never compares 4135s to 4013s. She spends copious time on Facebook but hopes to accomplish more with her life than getting more than 40 likes on that picture of herself with Ron Perlman. In her lifetime E.M. has written playbill blurbs, poems, screenplays, prose, articles, and more than a few greeting cards which have sustained her creative expression thus far. Being a greedy little writer, there is always room for more.
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