Happily Ever ... Whatever

Some people love happy endings.

Not this girl, not so much.

It’s not that I prefer tragic endings, I don’t.

Really, I’m just not a big fan of endings.

When I was little, in elementary school, we went to my grandparents’ home virtually every weekend. My parents would pick us up at the end of the school day on Friday, and we were off. It was about an hour away, and we’d always stay through the weekend before heading home. Every Sunday, as we backed out of the driveway, Mama would stand in the dining room picture window and wave goodbye. And every Sunday, I’d have a painful lump in my throat and I’d fight back the tears, determined that no one else in the car would know I was crying at the end of the weekend. The fact that we would be back again on Friday made no difference. In that moment, the visit was over. And it made me cry.

I was in the sixth grade when I read Gone with the Wind for the first time. It immediately captured my imagination, and I can’t even say how many more times I’ve read it since. There’s a lot to love, but I have no doubt, what I love most of all is the ending… because it doesn’t really end, does it? “After all, tomorrow is another day.” What could be more open-ended than that? It’s perfect.

I’ve wondered sometimes what it means that I love torturous, incomplete endings. In literature, in life, the stories that I can’t turn away from are the ones that make me crazy. They are replete with “what ifs.” What if this moment were different? It changes everything. The challenge of that, of untangling the action, of changing the narrative, that’s what sucks me in. There’s no ending, because in my imagination, it lives on. It twists, it turns, it entertains.

I’m not really a fiction writer. After I read Gone with the Wind for the first time, I wrote a sequel. Why not? The story was begging for it. I still have it. Twenty-something pages of lined notebook paper in cursive… not bad for a 12-year-old. My next foray into fiction didn’t come until a couple of years ago. For more than a year, I wrote a soap opera fan fiction. It was great fun. I had a posse of loyal readers whose feedback fueled my writing. It’s also exactly why I can’t write fiction.

I always thought I was too much of a softie to really write imaginary characters. I knew I wouldn’t have the heart to torture people who I had created and loved to write it well enough. It would make me crazy to make them foolish, to have them do the wrong thing. At the same time, I have no interest in the pablum of happily ever after, of tying it all up with a pretty bow at the end, of not engaging someone’s imagination with something painfully, frustratingly, delightfully entertaining. So, I knew fiction wasn’t my thing.

It’s still not, but now I realize what the real problem is.

I don’t like endings.

The soap fan fic was the perfect thing for me. It’s a soap, a serial, endless. And so I wrote and wrote. I wrote more than 100,000 words. I reached a perfect ending point. For chapter 100, I wrote a beautiful happily ever after. It was great, I was really happy with it. But even wrapped up in that chapter was a promise of more, that it wouldn’t end at happily ever after, because really, what ever does? So I wrote on. It’s dangling now at something like chapter 127. I could write another four or five chapters and put a bow on it. It’s been more than a year now since I touched it. I’m not seeing that bow in its future.

At work, one of my favorite meetings is the post-mortem, the debrief. After an event, we all sit together and talk about what we did. We look back, but it’s really all about looking forward. It’s assessing what we did, so we can decide what to do next. It’s about pushing the bar higher. It’s about a new beginning just ahead. 

It’s continuing the story.

Even though people think they love happy endings, the best ending of all offers the promise of more… because that’s what we all really want most of all.

To be continued…