When All Possibilities Collapse Into None
The moment when ‘is’ becomes ‘was’. When the artifice of the immutable and eternal crumbles into dust and blows away, revealing the void inside that was always there waiting to escape. We don’t really grieve for the loss of the past — indeed the past is already lost in the milliseconds it takes for our brain to register things as the present, disappearing from something you can touch and feel to something that only persists as a thought. When a facet of our reality is lost, we grieve for the future that will never happen. For all the possibilities that might have been, for everything we could have seen and done and felt, now just revealed as a vain hope, a protective mechanism put up by our brains to inoculate us against the idea that things can change so utterly in the blink of an eye. From always to nevermore.
The way in which we do grieve for the past is how certain information now no longer has a home anywhere outside our own minds. Memories, experiences, emotions once shared now reduced to ghosts haunting the lonely hallways of synapses that have lost their connection to the other. We can voice these things to other people of course but it isn’t the same — you can show them pictures of your house but it’s not their home, they never lived there, they don’t intimately understand the layout, couldn’t navigate it in the dark knowing someone would be holding their hand to guide them. They never felt that special warmth you shared, the laughter echoing in big homey rooms where everything was bright with shared affection, where it felt like an impenetrable fortress, impervious to change, and it felt like things would always be this way. The music you enjoyed together, favourite restaurants, movies you planned to watch, the special in jokes formulated over the years, the silly little things that you didn’t think were that important now dangle half finished, nobody to deliver the rejoinder, and you realise just how much they meant after all when there’s nobody to say them to anymore that will understand.
The gap between people is quantum — almost immeasurably small but utterly unbridgeable. You are you, they are them and never the twain shall meet. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than when the links we can sometimes build between them are suddenly and unceremoniously severed, revealing them as a construct you had fooled yourself into thinking was real. The threads lay flapping in the breeze created by the wake of the absence of the other, the space they used to occupy subtly but constantly exerting that vacuum pull, tugging each strand so you feel the pressure. And sometimes yanking them painfully when you least expect it.
Closure is just a concept made up by fiction writers because people want to believe everything gets wrapped up in a neat little package. It doesn’t. There’s always that one last thing you wish you had or hadn’t said, something that might have accomplished the impossible task of holding back the tide. One last thing you wish you could hear, or unhear. One last time where you could pretend everything was alright and your world was not about to shatter. If you’re one of the lucky ones who did get that mythical closure, hold it tight. Treasure it. Most people would kill for that.
The word closure brings to mind the healing of a wound, an apt metaphor in this case. Proper closure would be the wound shrinking in an orderly fashion, damaged tissue knitting itself seamlessly back together and sealing itself with perhaps the faintest shadow of a scar as a reminder should you care to look at it. But that’s not how it works. Oh, the wound may fester, become infected, but the body has remarkable healing capabilities — the problem is there’s always something left behind, a foreign body that can’t be broken down, like a shard of glass. So the body knits a wall of scar tissue around it, to stop it constantly damaging the area in which it is embedded. And it works, for the most part. But sometimes a sudden movement causes it to stab into those protective walls, causing a pain as sharp as any when it was fresh. It’s like that in the mind too. You build up those walls around the trauma of the loss but a sudden trigger, a reminder of something you once shared that is now a spectre without a home, wandering lost around those empty corridors — it tears that wall open and all the grief you sealed inside comes flooding out anew. And it happens again and again and again.
The possibilities were endless up until the moment they collapsed into nothing. For what was lost will never be found.
