Closing Time
I’ve always been a sucker for a great story. I knew pretty early on that stories were what I wanted to spend my life building. A year in Hollywood cured me of thinking it would happen in the form of screenplays. Copywriting at an eight-person shop in Watertown made me think, “maybe advertising.” And fifteen years later I’m lucky enough to make my livelihood building stories about companies and products – stories we call “brands.”
For all the feelings and belief and blind faith a great story can conjure, the thing I like best about it is its structure. Not much is more soothing to a Type A control freak than a good old-fashioned beginning, middle, and end. Looking back, I think that even before I fell in love with the guy, I fell in love with our story. A serendipitous meeting on a footbridge and an emotional whirlwind of a beginning. A middle that was going to be a slog because of the other characters involved – older kids, younger kid, ex-wives. But of the ending I was certain: ultimately we prove everybody wrong and make it out intact on the other side. Because that’s how love stories happen – the great ones. The ones of legend. I loved the idea of our story and the idea of my character in it. I love proving people wrong. I love being the exception. I love being the person who can always find a way.
I think, for me, that’s the hardest part of losing a relationship – one you think might last: you lose your story. Your structure evaporates. The ending goes haywire and isn’t anywhere near where it’s supposed to be. Your character takes a hard right. Far from being ‘the one’ who proves everybody wrong, she takes her place in the epilogue with the rest of the nameless extras who should have known better. I was reading a book by Yuval Harari, trying to get inspiration for a project at work, when I came across his take on stories: “If you want to make people really believe in some fiction, entice them to make a sacrifice on its behalf. Once you suffer for a story, it is usually enough to convince you the story is real.” WOOF. But yes. And I hate that the belief can linger even after the story is decidedly over. Harari goes on to say that “once personal identities and entire social systems are built on top of a story, it becomes unthinkable to doubt it. Not because of the evidence supporting it, but because its collapse will trigger a personal and social cataclysm.” Dammit, Yuval. You’re killing me.
The thing I keep circling back to is the first thing my parents taught me about stories: all the important ones have a moral. Some kind of universally teachable so-what. Which is to say they have a point.
I want desperately for the last year and a half of my life to have an effing point.
I find myself building the narrative in my mind already. If things hadn’t fallen apart in November I wouldn’t be going on this trip to New Zealand. Clearly something is going to happen here that will drastically alter my trajectory and put me on the path I’m meant to be on!
It was a great trip and all, but my current trajectory is on an Airbus back to frigid Boston. So that can’t be right.
No. No. The reason everything blew up the way it did is because I’m meant to move across the country for a couple months and discover my actual purpose in life on the top floor of a (worryingly) affordable Seattle AirBnB with a shared bathroom.
Writing it makes me wince. But I still want to believe it.
So I guess, by any standard, this is a very unsatisfying story. Because it hasn’t got anything close to an ending. But as I muck around somewhere in the early-middle, I find myself looking for signs of how things will finally resolve. I’m a little too willing to find depth of meaning in randomly googled horoscopes. I open fortune cookies that aren’t mine. Instead of eye-rolling at the tarot reader in Harvard Square I seriously considered walking in (it was closed).
But I will share with you a slightly odd thing that happened. The last song I heard in Queenstown, in the coffee shop at the end of the street, just before Reji and I hopped in the car to head to the airport. “Closing Time.” I’m not sure I’ve heard it in the last ten years. Maybe not in the last fifteen. It came out in 2000, the year I graduated from high school, and we all wanted to use it as our class song at graduation. 98% of it is perfect for exactly that occasion. But the part about “one last call for alcohol…” was a no-go with the administration. We settled for The Beatles.
But the last line of the last song I heard in New Zealand was “every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”
A sign? Who knows. But the more I think about it, the more it’s a little bit comforting. Because the beginning of a story is always the best part. That’s when anything can happen.
