Pages Menu
TwitterRssFacebook
Categories Menu

Posted by on Jul 15, 2013 in Mali Rose, Social | 0 comments

Closure

girl_with_umbrella-wallpaper-1024x768

 

Rookerville welcomes its newest writer to the team, Mali Rose.  Enjoy.

Be your own hero and Close the Damn Chapter 

Is there a difference between external closure (that which we get from others or circumstance) and internal closure (that which we make for ourselves)? Is one perhaps better than the other?  If we often can never attain the “Notebook” movie-ending closure that we crave, can we create our own closure through introspection, self-confidence, a little bit of grit and a whole lot of Kelly Clarkson?

The topic of closure has continually come up in my life in the past few weeks in various forms. Whether it’s through conversations with a friend who still dreams about running over her ex boyfriend’s fiance with a pick-up truck and then strangling her (because you can never be too sure), or my mother who lost both her parents at a young age, we humans seem to be continually searching for some type of closure. Is closure in its most basic form a way to say that the good in the goodbye just wasn’t good enough? (Thank you for introducing inadequacy to the masses Beyonce.) That we need something else to justify, explain or derive meaning from a traumatic departure or break in our lives?

To understand the value and desire for “closure”, (and because I’m from New York and where else would I go to understand my feelings besides my mother and Pinkberry), I schedule an appointment with a therapist. I find myself looking for answers in her green carpet, worn through in spots where clients anxiously swing their feet, desperately concentrating as if this map of scattered holes can connect the dots between my chaotic thoughts and feelings.  I think of all her past clients perched atop that cracked and stained leather couch picking at scabs of wounds that no longer bear resemblance to the actual event, who find themselves years later left only with a hefty bill and unanswered questions to events that now seem like faded and blurred memories that happened to a close friend or witnessed in a sad movie.

I discuss my need for closure with this certified stranger in a comfortably contrived room with tissues placed conveniently close at hand to force intimacy with someone you see once a week  for 42 exact minutes. I force my eyes away from the ticking money clock, and discuss the idea of getting in touch with the love of my life who woke me up one morning after living together for years and told me he was leaving and has since never looked back. What value, I argue, would I need to get from this person who is so utterly lost, that I could not in fact get from myself? What scares me, I confess, is that I’m still looking for answers, but what terrifies me is that maybe at the heart of this romanticized notion of closure, I just want to see him again. To form another memory that doesn’t involve the cloying sweet smell of dead roses left on the table while he moved out on Valentines day, or the feeling of my insides being ripped out as I find forgotten love notes tucked into unexpected crevices around our apartment, or the continual fear I have of receiving mail and seeing his name on the envelope.

My need for closure is just another way to identify that I’m still in the grieving process, though the silver lining is that this is the last phase. I’m still searching to fill a void, as a gaping hole was ripped open to reveal that I now need to get to know and accept the new me and realize all the ways this devastation has changed me irrevocably. I’ve found that I’m not who I was, and I never will get back to being that person. And I think that’s okay. I realize this phase is both an end and a beginning: the end of the internal negotiations and turmoil that preceded it, and the beginning of a new perspective. This new outlook is only available to veterans of the earlier phases; there is no shortcut. You have to drag yourself through these stages before you learn to crawl, stand up and eventually limp away. I’ve already had to learn how to wake up alone on a lazy Sunday and not reach for him, but I still have to relearn the things that make me happy, or the mundane everyday tasks that label me as independent like knowing the most efficient subway route, what to do on weeknights when ordering takeout for one doesn’t get you above the delivery minimum, how to reach things on the top shelf and how to stop searching for him on the streets of Manhattan.

However this resolve won’t stop me or any of us from continually seeking a shortcut. We live in an over medicated fast food nation of high speed internet and Tinder dating apps. Many of us will hang suspended and stuck in the gray matter praying for the possibility of an externally-mediated closure scenario that will deliver us from this agonizingly stagnant void. Desperate for any excuse to “Eat Pray Love” all over Europe and find The One to deliver the big C in a sexy accent over copious amounts of spaghetti and chocolate.

However “The desire for external endings is accompanied by the recognition that closure scenarios are usually unattainable, or, if attained, would almost certainly fail to deliver the imagined satisfaction.” He won’t ever say the things I need him to in order to justify or eradicate the hurt. Those wounds have already scarred.  By staring down the barrel of the darkest and weakest part of my soul- I realize that closure won’t get him back; and if it did, it would never be the same, because I can’t forgive what happened. Those wounds can too easily be reopened to risk the razor sharp edge that rekindled relationships precariously perch. I also won’t get closure by running off to foreign places and gorging myself on foreign food with foreign men. I would just gain weight instead of deep introspection, and perhaps even contract an STD. Juggling the immensely powerful desire to close a chapter and the rational understanding that it can never be externally granted, I will suffer horribly on this journey towards acceptance until I finally realize that it’s possible to just halt the cycle. It’s not easy, but at some point I can actively choose not to be the victim anymore. We all possess the ability to make our own decision to close a chapter, to find sense of self which leads to happiness and thus the closure we so desperately yearn for. It’s at that point that we realize we’ve finally gotten tired of reading the same fucking book with the same tired characters and we take a deep soul changing breath and move on.

Mali Rose

About Mali Rose

Mali Rose is a writer for Rookerville. She enjoys binge watching Scandal, doing random activities that produce a very strange life resume, eating a copious amount of Skinny Pop and going to empty dive bars. Rose dreams of giving up the corporate life and moving to Maine or Thailand but fears that the internet accessibility would affect her monogamous relationship with Netflix. Rose lives with Justine Kolsky in Manhattan. They have 1 dead and 2 questionably living plants together.

Comments

Leave a Reply

%d bloggers like this: