It’s Over

When you know you know.

Daring to write, here in the afterglow of a day apart, believing that someone is reading these words, perhaps someone I’ve never met, and that what I’m writing could be soothing for them, for you, for just one person besides myself as I spell my prayer.

We write, some of us, respectfully approaching something vaguely felt, angling in from the sides, finding and scattering clues between the lines, all the while reaching for something we can’t know until it appears on paper or screen and then we question whether we’re even close.

Sometimes we get close. And, as Lana Del Rey sang in one of my many heartbeats today, “when you know you know.”

It’s over. “It” may be a lost romance, a job that just ended suddenly, a dream that crashed and burned, a phone call with bad news, looking in the mirror and knowing things will only get worse. Sitting in a taxi in the rain driving home from the hospital. Alone.

It’s over.

There’s nothing like it. The finality, the vacuum … you see how inadequate words are? But when you know you know.

And … the sun rises again. Coffee. Clothes. Traffic. Speaking. Laundry. Another romance, job, another dream.

Until one day it really is over. Like, everything is over. “It will be like going to sleep,” my mother assured me when I asked about it as a curious boy and I immediately knew she was wrong.

I came to know for myself how it feels and it’s nothing like that. You’ve felt it too, that aching anchor that drags us down and almost drowns us until we either scurry back to the surface and invent ways to carry that weight forever, or we quit struggling and let it explode us through the ocean floor into a different world where we learn to breathe different air on our way home.

Death is coming for us all and we get to rehearse for it with every ending. With enough practice, we’ll have a good one.

My friend died. I miss him.