Better to have Gone, then Never Left

Every story needs an ending; otherwise, what are we even doing?

It's not that a story is defined by its ending, not as such: instead, it is antagonized by its conclusion. The Story is a clever inventor, fleeing down corridors, building bridges and blowing up walls you’d think were load-bearing, but constantly haunted by the grim-dressed specter of the Ending. Eventually the story has to either face the ending while it still has its dignity intact, or else run out the corridor-complex until it hits a dead-end and the Ending finishes of whatever might remain.

The Ending makes demands: if the Story is to die with dignity, it needs to have accomplished certain things. That fade to black needs to follow a hell of a show, and if it doesn’t, well, the Ending won’t leave the Story looking so pretty.

So what's a story then? Some might say, a thing with a beginning, middle and end that tells you something. Others might have more high flung academic concerns, about structure and the human mind. And those things are important, sure, and tangible in many ways. But me, I say that Story is something slightly bigger.

I think the universe is made of stories.

At least the way we see it, the way we feel about it and think about it. I think humans are above all storytellers, people who observe and experience all sorts of things, and then create stories about it. Long, short, boring, exciting, whichever, it’s not the quality that matters, it's the telling itself.

Over the years I’ve internalized this belief, that we on a deep and incorrigible level think about the universe in the same terms as we think about any old book or film or story about our sister going to the dentist, and I’ve come to believe that this makes telling stories the most important thing we can do.

Any action, political or social or personal, is really all about furthering a story we are telling about ourselves or our society, or somebody else and their society, and in being ideologues, we are merely dedicated to seeing a particular vision of a story through.

This religion of narrative has led me to do some strange things, certainly: I have my shirt to create a story about a person dressed in a consequentially boring way. I also move in a stiff, rigid way, to further that story. There’s a person in control of themselves, I imagine them saying, though my imagination never goes so far as tell me who “them” are.

Lastly, I like hard endings. Often, when we leave friends or a group of friends, it’s a soft farewell: we stop seeing them as often as before, we don’t think of them as often, they simply become less of a concern, as when the bond was in the prime of its strength. And that’s fine, really: lives change, and they do so in ways that are hard to predict or anticipate.

But I’ve never liked that. I think of a friendship as a story, and even when it’s at its best, I am curious about how it will end. When I know that it will start to die soon, then I try to take as much advantage of it as possible, so that when we do part, it will be with a heck of an Ending.  The Ending will be a point from where one can look back, evaluate, and conclude that it was a story well worth living.

Besides, stories need to end, for other stories to begin. It is better to have gone early, to make new stories, then lingered to long or never left, and ruined the old story.

This isn’t an Ending, thought. It’s a start to a story, and I don’t know how this story will go. I’ll kvetch and think out loud, and say quite a lot of silly and stupid things and maybe one or two interesting things, but that’s all to be told in the future.

For now, I don’t know anything of the Ending yet, but for every step this story takes, the closer it will get, and we will get to see, what it makes of it.

As you were,

A Kvetching Turtle