The perfect ending
Endings are nearly always disappointing. Not just in the way that your life suddenly becomes entirely separate from someone else's, but because they mostly aren’t romantic. Endings are dirty. Endings are tainted with words you regret speaking and things you wish you said. Endings are stumbled-over sentences and cracked voices. Saying goodbye feels like pulling your hair out of your head strand by strand until there are none left—and only then can you finally start to come to terms with it. Goodbyes don’t look how they do in Normal People or Fleabag and no one tells you “It’ll pass”.
Yet still I yearn for romance in endings. I don’t want to just say goodbye; I want to crash land. I want to be violently and perfectly jolted and feel the whole loss, all at once—but I want it to be quiet. I want to exist in the space between two hands that long to feel the touch of one another. I want to listen to the sound of a second heart beating and then never hear it again.
When artist Ulay made an appearance at Marina Abramović’s two-and-a-half-month-long performance at the Museum of Modern Art, the intensity of their encounter was, and still is, one of the most heart-wrenching and overwhelmingly beautiful, romantic visions of an ending. Their piece The Lovers, performed together over two decades earlier, featured the pair walking 5,995km of the Great Wall of China towards each other. Planned initially to unite them in marriage at the point they would meet, instead they hugged, shook hands and their tumultuous twelve-year relationship came to an end. Their collaborative art is a tea steeped in the water of their goodbyes and their final public encounter during Abramović’s The Artist is Present is the perfect ending.
In reality, people rarely give you what you want. I suppose the perfect ending can never really exist; to say goodbye is to end, and to end is to be final—romanticised or not. We experience endings every day when we walk down the street past hundreds of strangers and know we either will or will not see that person again in the course of our lives.
Romanticising is my most meditative and destructively self-exhibitionist trait. My brain detaches from my body and observes hardships through the lens of art and creation. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound? If I experience a goodbye and can’t romanticise it into writing, was it even worth anything to begin with? My pensiveness crystallises into black salt and I sprinkle it over everything I produce and consume.
A few months ago, I told someone we couldn’t speak anymore. It just felt like the right thing to do. They rationalised, didn’t argue about it—nor even particularly say how they felt—or try to stop me from leaving. I couldn’t fault them, but did I want them to dramatically confess their love for me and break down in tears of regret? Maybe. But, sometimes, things just end—it is as simple as that. I think we seek these romantic theatrics as a form of finding solace in loss, but goodbyes being romanticised doesn’t make them any less painful. In fact, I think we can hide behind the realities of separation by removing ourselves from the mundane. It’s as if our brains know the reality of endings and want to compensate by equating it to something poetic and palatable. Isn’t it a far nicer thought to end with something romantic rather than never speaking again after hanging up the last phone call on a random Monday? This hope is a speck of dust that sticks to my eyelashes.