Closure

There was one (okay, more than one) time in my wasted youth where I would regularly get calls from weepy friends and I’d drop whatever I was doing and be all “I’m on my way!” and hop in the car with a breakup CD and extra padding on my shoulders, ready to rumble. Everyone is a bit more settled now, so most of my conversations are about health inequality statistics or about what costume I’m going to wear to which party, or about two-toed sloths, or about mustaches—in fact just the other week I took part in an impromptu Beard Symposium, where people without beards got to ask all sorts of questions of people with beards (“Are you ever afraid your beard will spontaneously set itself on fire?”), and that was a very jolly conversation indeed. That’s how it is, mostly, for me. It’s been a while since I talked very much about relationships, and difficulties therewith, but you know how things go—everyone’s fine, everything’s good, and then BOOM it all washes out somehow and you’re going from lunch to dinner to home to Facebook, talking talking talking about how someone’s baby did her wrong, or how someone did her baby wrong, or basically how everyone just did everyone else wrong, and you have to come up with some coherent sounding theories about why, exactly, that might be.

So naturally I’ve been talking a lot about closure these last couple weeks, the famous Closure, which I have decided I basically don’t believe in. At all. You hear people say things like “If I could only JUST KNOW why my baby DONE ME WRONG I would feel SO MUCH BETTER.” (I often raise at least one eyebrow when someone says this). Or even “yeah, we’re going to meet for coffee and, like, talk about everything, you know. For closure.” And I secretly think, Ohhhhh, girl.

Why why why, goes the refrain, very often at a low insistent insanity-inducing frequency that only you can hear. Go into work, drink your tea and check your email WHY. Text your best friend about where you’re going to meet for lunch WHY WHY. Attempt tree pose in yoga WHY WHY WHY. If only you could get…answers. Surely there is some information, some very important information, that is missing, and if you can just get that information…well, what? What will happen then? What are you going to do now, girl?

When people ask for closure, I believe they are asking to see the one they love again. They’re asking to be alone, talking about something private and intimate. They’re asking for familiarity, for comfort—basically, they are asking to be in the relationship again, even if it’s just for the space of a coffee.

I actually do think that it’s important to come to some sort of peace when you lose someone you love. I heartily endorse learning from experience, and applying that learning to future decision-making. I just don’t think that other people—especially the person you used to love or still do love, the person you want the answers from—can contribute to that, not really. If they couldn’t tell you or talk to you about what was wrong when you were together, when they were actually supposed to be in love with you, then how can they tell you now? And more importantly, what difference does it make? “Oh, he’s still not over his ex,” or “Oh, he’s just not ready for a relationship right now” or “She wants really different things out of life than I do.” I mean, yes, sure, fine, that’s information—that very important information–but that’s like saying “I dropped my car keys down that gutter and the reason behind it all is that my hands were greasy from eating fistfuls of butter straight from the fridge before leaving the house, which contributed significantly to my inability to retain my keys manually when I was already late to work.” Yeah, okay. You know WHY now, but keys are still gone and you’re still going to have to decide whether to get all dirty laying down in the road trying to fit your arm through the grate or to just call a cab and hope you remembered to leave a spare under the front mat. I mean, maybe you can learn not to eat butter with both hands before you grab your keys, maybe that could be a useful outcome from this situation. That makes sense. Maybe you’ll use a spoon next time, or maybe you’ll forget all about it and just sail in spoon-free as soon as you get home from the key-cutter, or you’ll switch to marmalade–I don’t know your life. But I think you can come to that sort of conclusion on your own, from the evidence that already exists. On your own, or more likely: with your friends, or with your paper journal, or with your guitar or recorder or ukulele, or with your paintbrush or with your dog or with your hiking shoes, all of those things. Not the one you loved and the one you can’t be with anymore, for all the reasons you already know about. The one you think has all the answers to why you feel so bad is the one who can’t really tell you.

The thing I keep thinking about in the middle of my thirties, the thing I find I want most, is freedom. Specifically, freedom of mind and perspective. And not in the I-went-to-Burning-Man-and-ate-a-lot-of-mushrooms-and-had-sex-in-a-tent way, either; I mean the freedom to accept and understand that contradictory evidence co-exists in the world, and not just in the big world, either, but in the small world, the delicate cut-out world of our hearts. Someone can love you and leave you, it turns out, with no sense of internal inconsistency at all. One you accept that there is no answer to why, it all gets—well, I won’t say it gets easier. But I do think it gets closer to an important truth, and closer to being set free.