I’ve Always Thought I’m Good at Endings

But maybe not

Photo: Robert Couse-Baker

I’ve always thought I’m good at endings.

Like this one:

I asked, “When you told your friends you don’t love me anymore, how did they feel?”

And you said, “Not surprised.”

Or this one:

I spy your silhouette in the sunset and you’re either 91 million miles away or just beyond the volleyball nets. Depth perception was never my strong suit, so I guess I’ll see you next lifetime or on the boardwalk at 5:15 for an Arnold Palmer.

I also wrote this in a piece where everything was an ending:

It’s like I went to the beach and scavenged sticks and stones and red seagrass and self-ashored kelp and fashioned a replica of your hair and now I’m sailing the globe searching for moon-faced bald women with fangs.

I think he was paraphrasing someone, but I once heard Billy Collins say that “the beauty of a poem can be measured by the amount of silence it creates when it’s over.”

And as we know, there are plenty of kinds of silence. I remember I wrote:

I thought I heard your voice, but it was just echoes of a future version of myself reverberating in a cave the size of the galaxy.