“Closure?” I told a disbelieving friend before I left for Pittsburgh. This isn’t true either. The truth is that I don’t know if I ever had an ulterior motive to returning there; in my lonely head I was going there to share the holidays with someone so unmanageable he makes “party of two” feel like a mosh pit at a rock concert.
What is closure, anyway? Whenever you watch TV, there is inevitably someone talking about how they found “closure” to some aspect of their lives, whether it be the solving of a mystery, the begetting of a criminal, or justice served. In love and things differently serious, could closure be the discovery of a cruel triangle, the marriage of your lover to another, a new baby, 8000 miles between, or simply, feelings unreturned? What tells us when to move on? Do we ever move on? Maybe closure, then, is just a figment of our imaginations, an invented theory to give a meaning to something so seemingly pointless.
Sometimes people make you feel as if it’s against the law to love them if they don’t love you back. I’m sorry if I ever made anyone feel that way, because it was certainly not my intent. Please, love away, I say. It’s not until you shun someone who loves you that you realize how little there actually is to go around. It’s like dumping out water in the desert because you’re not thirsty at that moment. I think too, that sometimes people have water, but they won’t share it with others, even though the singular selfishness of it hurts them. Maybe they are afraid it will run out, or that the people they share it with will keep asking for more.
I had a friend tell me that he had never been in love. That no one had ever made him cry, that he had made no one cry. I sometimes cannot decide whether to feel bad for him or to view him in a blessed light. On the one hand, he is missing out on half of the happiness of life, perhaps more. On the other hand, he has managed to avoid the debilitating pain of loss, of love unrequited, of affection gone awry. Unsurprisingly, he was usually the least sympathetic to my cause, although on occasion he had serendipitously empathetic observations about my plight.
But empathy isn’t love, and that’s life half missing.
