Not Everything Is Meant to Stay

I want to talk about the story we tell ourselves when something ends, and about the fact that almost all of us have only one story available, and it is a story about failure.

Start with how much of a life this actually covers, because we tend to think of endings as rare and dramatic, and they are neither.

There are the friendships that dissolve without an event.

Betrayal at least leaves you something to hold, a reason with edges to it.

I mean the ordinary ones.

where two people who genuinely loved each other's company simply stopped being in the same building, and the thing that held them turned out to have been partly the building.

There are the groups.

Six people welded together by a project for 18 months, who knew each other's moods and marriages and orders at the coffee place, who said constantly that they would keep this up afterwards, Then the project ended and there was a leaving drink.

And within four months, it was a group chat where somebody occasionally posts a photograph.

There are the places, a city you lived in for four years, whose bus routes you knew, whose particular light in October you can still summon.

you will probably never live there again.

Nothing went wrong there.

It simply finished.

There are the versions of your own life, the years when your house was full of small children and noise and exhaustion, and you were needed every minute of every day.

That ended too, and there was no final evening, no last time announced as the last time.

Somewhere in there was the last occasion you carried a sleeping child from a car to a bed, and you did not know it was the last, because nobody ever does.

And there are the smaller things that are somehow no less real.

The Sunday lunches that stopped when someone died.

The band you were in.

The routine you loved and cannot reconstruct now, though nothing prevents it.

There is a particular category worth naming on its own, which is the endings that went by without being noticed at all.

There was a last time you played a particular game with a friend, a last time you walked a certain route home, a last time a child asked you to read to them, and you read the book slightly too fast because there were dishes waiting.

None of these were marked.

They passed as ordinary days, indistinguishable from the ones before them.

And only years later did it become clear that one of them had been the end of something.