Fare thee Well, Old Friend

We looked to nature to give us closure;
a mound of stones over a loved one's grave
and scattered with seeds of foxglove and fern.
We buried bluebell bulbs between the stones
and planted a sapling for a headstone.

Go into the earth, we said,
let your bones mingle with those of wolf and fox
mouse and bird, beast and man.
We will remember you here
in this field of honour you loved in life
where the trees sigh beneath the wind and rain
and rabbits keep cropped the sweet grass above your grave.

Every time we passed the spot we smiled
where the flowers bloomed and the oak tree grew
until one day the council sold the land
and built a car park instead.
Dear spot thirty-nine bearing, proud, the inscription
reserved for human resources manager,
hasn't quite the ambience it owned before.

- Rachel Green

Closure

When a relationship ends you look for closure of one sort or another. Whether it's the finality of a divorce – split the house, the car, the dogs (thank goodness we didn't have a child) and go your separate ways or an inelegant break-up (Hey! You still have my Nirvana CDs) we all need some closure. Put a lid on the box marked 'closet skeletons' and bury in the the back garden.

When I broke up with my spouse after a seven year marriage it was, for the most part, amicable, On my side, anyway. We'd gone into one of those ruts you either have to break out of, break up from or purchase twin beds over. In our case is was a divergence of interest. He wanted freedom to date other women and so did I. The writing was on the wall, next to the gravy stains from dinners thrown during arguments. Oddly, it was only after the relationship ended that I learned to defend myself. I think a lot of domestic violence could be avoided by a good grounding in jujitsu. I'm an accomplished swordswoman too, as it happens, but I've never fancied trying to convince the police that a husband chopped into three separate pieces with a katana was self defence.

I left the marital home with some difficulty. Not so much because of the emotional ties but rather because I had accumulated several thousand books and I only had a tiny car. I took the books, my paintings and the cats, he kept the house, the car, the computer and the dogs. I was sorry to go. I loved those dogs. I moved into a succession of flats the worst of which turned out to be condemned with faulty gas and no heating. I generally kept warm by means of a spotlight bulb and a lazy cat. I organised my life, deleted all the pictures of the last seven years and joined several online gay communities. Life went on. Closure was, I thought, easy to come by.

Then the postcards came. One a day for six months, with Sundays off because there was no delivery. “Are you happy now?” one might say in big red letters. “You've destroyed my life.”
Thanks to the edicts of the Royal Mail, which gave them the right to refuse to deliver objectionable material, there was nothing too offensive on the postcards. He must have tried, though, because they soon began to arrive in sealed envelopes. Most of the time I recognised the writing and dropped them into a box unopened but once in a while he'd fool me by printing the address on a typewriter and posting it from a different town. I'd open these to find them full of colourful nouns.

I never replied to any of them and like all bullies who consistently fail to provoke a response, they slowed to one every other day, two a week, one a fortnight. When I had none for three months I packaged them all up and posted them back to him. Perhaps he made an art installation out of them.

I never heard from him again, but for the odd forwarded bill. I don't care what he did afterwards and I presume he never cared about me. I doubt he even knows my name any more, since I changed it to match my new partner's. He did make it into one of my novels, mind, a tribute he will be totally unaware of but it gives me a sense of satisfaction, particularly as he dies in a particularly gruesome fashion.

There! That's the key to my particular method of closure. I turn them into characters in my novels, kill them off and move on. I don't have the room in my head to have it cluttered up with memories of ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends (from my wilder youth) and ex-partners. Better to clear them off, clear them out and move on.

I'm sorry, who?

© Rachel Green 2011

TIme is On My Side (In Fiction)

I'm good at writing the last lines in stories. Often, I have the final words figured out long before anything else. I like coming up with the neat ending, the perfect parting shot, the memorable farewell. Those final words are a bit like a punchline and, as someone who spent a few years writing greeting cards, I know the punchline is all important.

One of my favorite greeting cards I ever wrote was intended to be the last line of a story: "I'm glad you broke up with me. I was starting to feel guilty about cheating on you."

Zing! I love that. It's funny, it's bitter and it says so much about the character (or the giver of the card). It's the kind of closure one never gets in real life-- which maybe is why I'm a fiction writer.

I'm trying to recall moments in my life that offered the kind of real and final closure that fiction so often provides. I can't think of many. All the moments of closure I've experienced have been the result of big moves or death or having the circumstances take the choice out of my hands entirely. In the case of death, the closure was with my mother-- a relationship that was destined to never have any sort of real closure as long as we were both alive. And death is a rather unsatisfactory form of closure-- it takes away the options. There is no argument to fight, no tearful reunion, no epiphany to be had-- even when it brings a sense of guilty relief, death is a hollow, empty kind of closure.

For that matter, time itself is a kind of unsatisfactory closure. The failure to make up my mind about something often results in the decision being made for me. I thought I would be childless because I couldn't commit to the idea of having children. At almost 41, I decided to give it a whirl-- and here I am, three years later, weeks away from having my second baby. According to statistics, time wasn't on my side and I was likely to remain childless for having waited so long. Closure, as provided by mother nature. There's a resounding finality to the kind of closure that results in the slamming of a window, but I don't know how satisfactory it might be when its someone else doing the slamming.

Letting time in the form of deadlines provide closure on other things-- writing, education and job opportunities-- has led to a deep sense of discontent with myself. Sometimes, it is all well and good to go with the flow and see where life takes me-- but most of the time I reject the idea of letting life happen to me that way. I want to be in control of my decisions! I want to create my own closure! Even if control and closure are only illusions of my over active imagination.

But again, the most satisfactory end game moments are rarely found in real life. Friendships and relationships go out with a whimper, not a bang; lifelong goals wither on the vine as other responsibilities take precedent; choices we make are often balanced by the choices other people make: "I love you" is not closure-- "I don't love you" is.

The saying goes, "When one door closes, another opens." It's not always true. Some things, once gone, are gone forever and can never be replaced or forgotten. It's closure of the most bitter sort-- to lose something and know it was a one of a kind, whether a person or a dream or an experience, it's closure tinged with sadness and regret.

Time steals from us. It takes away options and choices and we say things like, "It wasn't meant to be" or "It happened for a reason." These are the statements of closure, of acceptance. True or not, we are forced to acknowledge that time is going to do the job for us if we can't do it ourselves. But when the closure is going to be painful-- as it so often is-- time softens the blow. Time takes away the litany of questions about what to do, what to do say, how to say it, when to say it, whether to pursue it any further. Time says, "Enough is enough. It's over. Move on."

In fiction, time stands still. I can dawdle over the ending, tweak the words until they hum with significance and resonate in my soul. I can say goodbye, I love you, fuck you, you will never hurt me again-- and I can take my sweet time saying it. This messy existence of mine is tidy in fiction, it makes sense, it takes the path I want it to go. And, if I decide I want to take another path, fiction provides me with endless roads not taken-- all of which are mine to explore at will. I can create the closure missing from my real life, I can commit to the decisions that are too big and scary to make, I can give the farewell speech that I was too tear choked and tongue tied to say. Fiction lets me create my own closure. Writing that closure is my salvation from regret.

From the Depths

First comes the funeral, then comes the sorting-out.

Both my elderly parents died within six months of each other in 2009. In summer 2010, all the heirs (heiresses) gathered to sort through all the family belongings that were still left in storage. I chose a minimum of old things (mostly books) because I didn’t want to leave anyone else with such a massive job after I’m gone.

Summer 2011: the time of reckoning. My own basement was stuffed with the detritus of several lives, so I decided to sort out while I’m still here. It’s been three days, and I’m nowhere near finished.

Basements or cellars are such an obvious symbol of the subconscious that it hardly seems worth mentioning. In both cases, stuff that is simply ignored or left to moulder eventually becomes a health hazard.

“Closure” now seems to be what all distressed souls want, a kind of holy grail that leads so many into therapy of various kinds. It sounds like a great relief: after all the sorting and analyzing, a door can be closed. In some cases, the house can be torn down so that better use can be made of the space it stood on.

The longer I live, the more I see “closure” as a fantasy and a convention in fiction. Readers (and writers) want to know when they’ve reached the end of the story. Something needs to happen to wrap up the loose ends.

Real life, of course, is so much messier.

My mother kept every drawing, poem and story I ever made as a child. It was a mind-boggling collection that I couldn't afford to keep, so I shredded most of it this morning. The big themes of my artwork and writing were family love, patriotism and some vague but enthusiastic Christianity (including a picture of God as a smiling man with a brown beard, made when I was six.) There is even a romance involving three fairies who live in "cucumber cottages" (the actual cucumber plants in the family vegetable garden). It all indicates a happy-enough childhood and a degree of naivete that would probably be hard to find now.

According to most of the stories that were read to me when I was young, and the stories of "older girls" that I found in school libraries, a wedding was usually the grand finale of the life of a young girl exploring her options. Marriage was the conclusion, the end of loneliness but also the end of choice. Apparently there was nothing to say after that.

The ever-present assumption that I was a "normal" girl who would eventually marry and "settle down" to have babies and keep house helps explain the rage and despair that seem to appear suddenly in my sketches and jottings (often done in class) from my teens. School felt like an oppressive institution, but to become a "career girl" I would need to stay in school as long as I could stand it. Then I had to hope I could find a workplace that would hire a pathetic, unmarried woman. As a wife, I probably wouldn't be allowed to work for money.

Most of the girls I knew were hoping to get married as soon as they could get pregnant: at 13, 14 or 15. In Mormon country, this was both legal and expected. My reluctance to do this identified me as a freak.

My caricatures of middle-aged teachers (who look like zombies or gorillas) and my political cartoons about the War in Vietnam (more evidence of the stupidity of adult authorities) expressed my general resentment in a way that seemed trendy to me at the time.

My male classmates were understandably afraid of being drafted into the war and not living to the age of majority. I sympathized, and wanted to rescue all of them, including the ones who still clung to the patriotism of American childhood. (At an early age, I couldn't distinguish God from the President.) To my dismay, boys seemed to resent girls in general. We weren't being drafted, and they assumed we all expected them to support us for life. Except for ball-busters like me, who wanted to steal their jobs.

I realized that a wedding wouldn't begin a phase of "happily ever after" for anyone involved. In due course, I learned this by experience.

Being reminded of all this by fragile old documents reminds me that not only is the personal political (and vice versa), but that some sources of stress are really persistent.

While I struggle to rid the basement of black mould and useless, broken things, I've been told I am not only haunted by my parents and my own past. A psychic friend of my spouse said she "saw" an African man in our house, and asked her if he could be her ancestor. Spouse said she doubts it. She thinks he is my Nigerian ex-husband, who died suddenly of a heart attack on New Year's Eve 2006.

I don't know if I am haunted by anyone but myself, but I do know that relationships don't end with death. Only amnesia on the part of the living could end the silent conversation. I hope my Ex is at peace, wherever he is, but I don't want him back, not the way he was. I can't seriously imagine him any other way.

The mess in the basement leads me to messes on other floors. I can't be sure I will ever have a perfectly clean, well-organized house to live in. And I can’t find a way to bring this piece to a satisfying conclusion. It seems that life is a series of connected rooms, or chapters in novels that can always be followed by one more sequel. Stay tuned.

Endless Roads

I had the dream again last night. A Dodge van, packed with cardboard cases of flowers, just arrived at a small town airport. Arkansas County road signs passing us by at dawn as my old friends, frozen in time at about their mid twenties, singing Christian hymns and a few songs they’ve written themselves. Someone has a guitar with part of the finish scraped away around the sound hole by the aggressive pounding of the pick. Then a group prayer, then the team mother, a Japanese woman, passes out the simple breakfast of yogurt and granaola. Meanwhile the team captain never takes his eyes off the road as time passes us all by very fast.

Everyone is frozen in the flower of their youth, which will fade off stage like the roses in the boxes. All except me, who has faded already, who am not frozen in time, but sitting among them, the way I remember them, I am as I am; vain about my hair, bad feet, bad breath – unless I chew gum- thick bearded and slightly over weight, like an Arab oil sheik down on his luck.

I’m chatting with Mariko-san, the team mother who someday will be married off to an American I know named Ray, I tell Mariko that I’m only going to be doing this for two weeks and then I have to go home. I have a family, a kid getting ready for college and a job to get back to. She gives me a sad knowing look, as though this were all beneath me.

They drop me off in a small town with a carton of roses and a bucket. If the cops kick you out, leave a not under the post office flag pole and hitch to the next town. “What town is this?” I shout at the tail lights as the van toddles back onto the highway and speeds off. And suddenly I’m very afraid.

“One should not be afraid of new things,” I whisper to myself or god or someone and then I wake up in the dark.

The little news anchor that lives in my head says “Good morning,” and even though I don’t want to hear it rattles off the ticker tape of the coming day’s events and things that need to get done, and unsettled worries and problems, mostly to do with money. I don’t want to remember those things, I want to remember my dream. I want to remember the words to the song we were singing before breakfast, what was it? I want to wake up my wife and ask her, because I think she might know. She knew that life. She is the last remaining relic of it. Does she ever dream about the old days? Why do I never ask her what she dreams? What the hell is wrong with me these days? How did I become this?

The past is never far from me, I hug it close. I don’t want closure, on the contrary I want to remember, the way a historian would want to remember. If it weren’t for my wife and my photos I would believe it was all a strange dream after all. I wish I’d had a better camera in those days. I wish I’d written better diaries, knowing someday I’d want to remember. The past defines us. In an age where everything changes so fast and often catastrophically, we’re always a little lost, a little undefined to ourselves. It makes us hungrier than ever to fill up the spiritual gap with something by which we can define ourselves to ourselves and others. There is a great hunger for intimacy in our culture which seems to increase in proportion to our personal freedom to define ourselves but too often without the interior life that would help us define ourselves.

In myself there is also a great craving for intimacy. When I leave the house, and step out into the world I know I’ll feel the walls come up around me. Even though I like people, I will find it suffocatingly difficult to hold small talk with them, and the people will sense it too, my discomfort, an unspoken desire to be alone. Living communally all my life, among people I felt close to, I never had to learn the social craft of making friends or simply putting aside my plans to chat with others. But out in the world, I am contained within my solitude and it takes a great emotional effort to leave my inner speculations and just reach across to others for that human touch.

Why do I dream of them thirty years later? What does the dream mean?

As writers we deal in images. Images are our stock and trade. Image is how I write. I begin with a compelling image and try to explain it to myself. It’s the seed from which a story sprouts and I seek out images. Images are the language by which the unconscious makes a statement to us. The unconscious doesn’t distinguish between fantasy and reality, and it doesn’t use language. When I’m in the old van on the road with my young friends, this is a very complex image. Its an encapsulation of ideas, mixed into a pungent stew of words and activities. Its an image of having one foot in both worlds, the world of the past which was so carefree, and a world in the present where I worry about taking care of my family in a bad economy. A world where I was free of my solitude, and in the constant company of the known and loved, my big messy family. And all the while promising them to return to the responsibilities of my present day family. It was a world of adventure and instability, suitable for a young man, whereas these days I long for routine and predictability.

Rather than let go of the past, when I meditate, sometimes I try to bring all the various images I can find from the present to very earliest possible. I want to string them together like beads to try to get a sense of who this person is and whether or not he’s real or if I just imagined him. I wonder if the day will come when I will wake up in the back of a jostling van speeding down a county road and look out the window with confusion and wonder and say to the young Japanese lady sitting next to me “I just had the strangest dream. I just dreamed I was a frightened middle aged civil servant with a family and bills to pay. God, I’m glad it was only a dream.”


C Sanchez-Garcia

It's Just A Brian Blessed In My Throat

There are certain endings to certain things that have stayed with me all of my life. Majestic endings to movies, of such power and beauty that even thinking about them makes me cry.

Like the ending to Alien 3, for example. I had never cried over the end of a movie, before I saw Alien 3. Hell, I'd never cried over any part of any movie full stop, before that fateful night when we rented it from Ritz video and I put on my pyjamas that were perpetually too short for my legs.

Ah, how young I was, then. It was only a short while since I'd laughed at my stupid cousin for blubbering over ET. I mean, it was just a rubber alien that even my eleven year old self knew looked sort of like a misshapen penis.

Who cries over a misshapen penis?

Apart from me, when it's bursting out of Ellen Ripley's chest.

It was the first time I ever experienced the life lesson: if you laugh at it and believe it will never happen to you, it will undoubtedly happen to you TIMES ONE MILLION LATER ON.

Because it did. Oh, by God it did! I thought my cousin's crying had bordered on lunacy?? Oh, it had nothing on the blubbering heights I achieved, on seeing Ellen Ripley let herself fall from that platform. I actually think that this was the moment when my Mum realised I wasn't like other people. They didn't understand why I was crying! I didn't understand why I was crying! What I was doing didn't even resemble crying!

It was like Brian Blessed had decided to die inside my throat.

All of which brings me to my rather circuitous point: I would kill to be able to write an ending like that. To write an ending that moves, and disturbs, and brings together all the majesty of the things that have come before it. Because although Alien 3 is a kind of a not that great movie, no-one can deny how perfect that ending is.

How amazing the writer must have felt, after coming to THAT conclusion. To tie together all the strands of Ellen Ripley's life in one glorious moment of heroic self-sacrifice!

I can't even tie my own shoelaces. Never mind bring together the disparate elements of a novel I've just written into something meaningful and satisfying - though I suspect that's the lot of a pantser like me.

I mean, I do mostly know where my stories are going to end up. And sometimes I have some lovely images in my head of what should happen. But largely I just stagger around in the dark, grasping at straws made out of baby oil, wondering if I can justifiably call this thing I've written an ending.

Sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn't work out quite as well. Sometimes I just meander on forever, in search of closure that doesn't want to come.

But that's okay, because by God I enjoy the trying. And that one moment when something does come together in some dovetail you could never have predicted? Ah, it's as glorious as realising you can cry over a movie, after all.

The Hardest Part

By Kathleen Bradean

I'm great at ending things. Last lines of stories often present themselves long before I've wound my way through the tale. I've moved so often that packing up and walking away has never been difficult. Being a military kid who hung out with other military kids while growing up, I learned to make friends fast, enjoy it while it lasted, and then to forget the person the moment they, or I, moved on. I've been that way with lovers, places, even things. Attachment isn't in my vocabulary.

It was the only way to live without going crazy with grief at the thought of a new school, new house, new town. At some point though, I stopped moving, but I haven't really set down roots yet. Considering that when we moved in to my current residence it was my twenty-second address in thirty years, you can understand why I felt it was just another place and that eventually I'd have to pack up again. Fifteen years later, I should rethink that. Almost a third of my life has passed in this one place. You'd think I'd be able to hang a picture on the wall by now. Instead, I feel as if I'm just house sitting for the next tenant.

I love Los Angeles. I know it's fashionable to hate it, but I have great affection for this city. That doesn't mean that I feel as if I belong here. Long ago, I made my peace with the fact that I'd never truly have a home, a place I belonged completely, but of all the places on earth that I could be an outsider in, this is one I want. I can stand back and shake my head at it, lament the tragedy of land use and loathe the Westside with every fiber of my being, but I can also be incensed that the media, which lives here, keeps pushing this image of vapid greed and intellectual stagnation that is as fake as their spray-on tans. Or maybe that's their Los Angeles. They're welcome to it. None of the city is mine, after all.

The other thing I'm terrible at is maintaining friendships. Oh, I talk to people through email for years, but there's no one locally that I hang out with. I returned to a place where I had some friends from long ago, but we don't have much in common now and while I enjoy seeing them, I don't go out of my way to keep in regular contact. I have no childhood friends. I don't even keep in regular contact with my family. They are always the ones who reach out to me. I have no real past with anyone. No one ever says, "remember when we..." to me. I can't remember the names of kids I played with, teachers, or even all eleven of the schools I attended. Past lovers are fleeting impressions more than involved memories. Sure, sometimes I wonder if they ever think of me, but then I decide that they don't waste their time. If they're only fleeting impressions to me, I doubt I meant much more to them.

I'm not even sure how adults form new friendships. I feel like an intruder in their lives when I start getting personal with them, so I back off. That instant camaraderie of military kids doesn't translate to deep, lasting relationships in the real world. I'm always amazed at the things that people know about each other. When did you find that out? How did that come up in conversation? Do you really just pick up the phone when you feel like talking and bond? I'm completely inept at it. The few relationships I have like that are ones that mean so much to me that I'm willing to keep inserting, shoving, and muscling into their lives to keep the connection. There are a few more people I'd love to build that with, but it doesn't come easily or naturally to me.

Closure is easy for me. It's a neat and tidy wrap-up. Like the end of a story. There's that last line, weighted with meaning, a period, and then the page goes blank. Sometimes, there are even those words, The End, to make it clear that everything stops at that point. The world may go on, the character may continue, but this episode is complete. The hardest part for me is saying, "No, it isn't, and it never will be."