Every Ending Ever Written Is a Lie. Middles Doubly So. (Patreon)

It is the hush at the close of the year.

It always feels hushed to me, even if it's full of noise. The Northern Hemisphere in me, I suppose. There is always some flavor of excess dark, some flavor of excess cold, some sense of putting things away for the long white road of January. Even though New Year's Day is meant to be all new beginnings, December 31st has always felt like an ending to me.

I don't know too terribly many people mourning the end of 2024. It's been a strange, sour time. But as I've thought so often lately, maybe that's because I'm in my 40s, also a strange and sour (and sweet, yes) time when things start to wobble, even for those who did pretty well with the first act or two. Family starts to die, friendships and marriages fray and tear and shred, children and houses are either a constant responsibility or a swiftly-retreating option. Your health starts to whine, if it doesn’t scream. If not your health, at least your strength. If alcohol or its assorted dirtbag friends are going to be a problem, they often start becoming one in the late 30s and early 40s. Careers stall more often than they take off or wither suddenly on the vine. We 40s folk are acutely aware of politics; if we weren't before, because we're now at the stage of life where we need to think about the future, and if we were aware before, the effects of the politics of our youth come home to roost in middle age.

And if the world outside our hearts starts to go seriously corkscrewed around the same time these very normal crumblings tumble through our personal lives, it all gets jumbled up together into a ball of discontent without beginning or end.

There's a reason Dane's Inferno begins: Midway through the journey of life, I found myself in a dark wood, the good and right road lost to me...

It's not that you can't lose the road at any phase of life, but halfway through is where it's just ever so common to start finding out what breed chickens you reared in your youth that are coming home to roost with you now that they're grown.

The middle is always the hardest. In books, in life, in tasks, in most things. A thing I say as an oldest child who was the youngest in most of her cohorts until very recently--and is still the youngest author on any given panel about 50% of the time.

The middle is where there are no roads.

And 2024 certainly has been the difficult middle child of the 2020s. I doubt 2025 plans to be any easier on the weary or the wanting.

I've tried to comfort myself with many thoughts over the last two months. Few have stuck. But when I am stuck, it's always to narrative that I turn. Its rhythms and patterns, its great slow heartbeat, its needs and wants and flaws, its lies and its truths, its ways of being and knowing, its little habits, its sweet endearing routines, its grandiose moods, its highly aggravating failings, its self and its shadow.

I have proven not very good at marriage over the course of my life. I always thought I would be good at such a thing, but empirical evidence cannot be ignored. Yet look at that paragraph, written in the Maine dark at a black table without half a thought for where it intended to go: narrative, in all its forms and fashions, has been so very like a wife to me all these years. More true and steadfast, both for my part and hers, than any human union.

Gods, I do love her so. How we live and move together, meet in some moments, become estranged in others, find one another again. We make meals, make merry, make love, make children, make comfort, make a home.

And what narrative says about the end of one story is that such a thing simply does not exist. It never has. It never will. It cannot have. And it cannot learn. She tries so hard, my love does. But it's not in her nature.

Narrative cannot abide an ending, any more than nature a vacuum.

An ending, any ending, is just a choice. Nothing more or less profound than where somebody, somewhere, decided to stop telling the story.

You already know this, of course. You never thought for a moment that the void descended and nothing else of note ever happened after the last page or frame of any story you've ever experienced. Obviously the knight must go on to face becoming a lord. The princess must function as a queen; both must wrangle with marriage rather than courtship, politics rather than conquering. The dark and terrible enemies must regroup and devise new schemes, or how darkly terrible could they ever have been? Youth must face middle age, middle age must face decline and growing truly old, old age must look death in the eye.

Even death is not an end. There are those who grieve and how they learn to live on. There is what the dead leave behind. There are legacies. There are broken souls in the wake, children, generations. There are aftershocks, great and small. There are remnants. There are echoes. There are ghosts like a blanket over the world.

And as the Return of the King is not an end, as Return of the Jedi is not, as Avalon is not, as Paradiso is not, as Revelations is not, so too, 2024 is only an end if those with the luxury and power to speak choose to stop telling the story. Choose to surrender the narrative to others. Choose to fall silent.

Oh, what a graceful and lovely and delicate and wise thing that is to say, and what a horrid, hard, ugly, filthy, cruel, grueling thing it is to have to do.

I know. Oh, how I know.

But once you've accepted that endings never really existed but that some authority somewhere said "Now is when the tale stops, because it serves my purposes to end it here and not there, not later, not hence or thence or hereafter, certainly never beyond," then what are we to make of middles?

Good god, what can you ever point to as a middle at all?

No one in a book nows they're in the middle of any goddamned thing whatsoever. And neither do we. They don't know because they don't know they're in a book, they don't know they're created to move through that story, they don't know their pain furthers any cause or hope or need, even by an inch. They only know their pain is real and deep and seems to go on without end. They only know how little they can control of any of it. They're just in a mess trying to figure out how to not be in a mess anymore.

Like us. How like us. And we here in the real world where, allegedly, we are not exactly subject to the rules of narrative, at least not the way fictional beings are, we have no utterly no eye for middles, let alone the proper two. Because we cannot know when it's the last day of our lives' years, so who is to say when the middle could possibly be? Today? Perhaps. But maybe when we were 25 and full of fizzing energy, enough, perhaps, but only perhaps, to shatter the wall between us and the future. Maybe when we are 55 with so much road left ahead.

We don't know and can't. So any given day could be the midpoint turn. Passing without noise or announcement, slipping past us on a busy city street, brushing our cheek with its lovely ringed fingers, the fringe of its ever-so-silken scarf. And any given day could be the barest beginning of the real story our past was only ever preparing to tell. But it could be the last act, too, the slow drawing of the curtain, the locking of the doors, the twilight at the end of the year--which is, and has never not been since we all committed to this madness of a calendar, paradoxically also the beginning of winter, and never once the end of ice and shadow.

 A middle is a thing to get through...but on the path to...what? That storied ending? The one that was always a lie and a feint, a promised ball forever yanked away at the last second?

2024 feels like the closing of many, many things. Bright things, sparkling, perhaps so bright we took them as a given, took them for the sun, unable to burn out within our lifetimes, as constant as gravity and grief.

But it cannot be. It simply cannot be.

Because there's no such thing as an ending. There is only, only more story, unto the ultimate extinguishment of that still-perfect, faithful, golden sun and the devouring of the planets by a hungry red sphere of final, gasping, sighing illumination.

But still, even then, illumination there will be.

Illumination there must be.

We will advance into the next act. We will fight. We will hurt. We will dance. We will become. All of us together, hand in hand. That together is what makes us more than carbon. More than primates. More than mistakes. And no antagonistic force can take that together away, they can only try to steal it to warm their frigid frost-bound hearts, to keep what is not theirs, what makes life life, what makes life move, what animates meat into beauty, all to hide it away in the eye of a needle, in the egg of a hen, in the belly of a fox, in the depths of a locked chest at the bottom of a well.

It's all there in the stories.

So fuck them. Fuck the keepers of our fate. They keep nothing. We live at the bottom of that well. They made us live here. They told us this dank and lightless place is all we deserve, all we were ever worth. This oubliette is where they put us so that they could live in the light and feast on the pleasure of watching us drown to their tune.

But they don't know stories. The best they can do is half-remember fables of wealth deserved, triumph unending, middles and ends. They are fables. We know the truth, because somewhere along the way, those who pleasure themselves at the feast of our pain forgot to keep making pretty stories to hang the whole thing on and told us to shut the fuck up and be happy they gave us a well.

But we do have the well. Each other. Connection. Will. Refusal. Memory. Love. Mercy. Family. Hope. Even cynicism, great protector that it is. We grew those crops through the well-stones with light reflected down through the moss for a minute a day. We know how to move and love and live and try here. Even when every single stone of this place tells us to give up and let the waters rise. They cannot grow anything from seeds. They've never had to. But we know how. And we'll have to do it, even though we'd so much rather just live our lives and love each other and suffer none of this.

We know how. We hoped we'd escaped--but that wasn't an end either. We've done this before. Through all of recorded history. No one gets to skip the fight, no matter how we wish we could, or our children could, or anyone could.

We know how to sing at the bottom of the years. How to sing so loud the future has to come, just to see what's making that fragile, untouchable, glorious sound.

Take my hand. Take my hand because there is no middle. Take my hand because there is no end. Only the unwavering tale. Take my hand because I love you. And I will do everything I can to protect you through the lie of the middle, and the illusion of an end. Take my hand, and I will see you tomorrow.