Closure
By: Kyle Tam
I’ve started this story twenty times, trying to think about who I was writing for. When you go to writing workshops they tell you to visualise your audience, to make sure you choose your language with that intention in mind. I tried that, but then I remembered your little smile and infectious laugh then stopped. That’s the penance of the author I suppose. Our imaginations get to run away with us.
It’s a good story, I think. The story began with Diane and Chester, but then I realised Diane and Chester were terrible names. Then it became Dennis and Kiara, then Ariadne and David, and then Chloe and Dustin before I went back to Diane and Chester. Sometimes people have terrible names. Names so generic they aren’t even worth repeating, like yours or mine. In any case, Diane and Chester had never met before, had lived different lives in the same country. Then, one day, they meet. It’s happenstance. Pure chance. But they meet and instantly they know-
They hate each other.
I wrote out how their eyes lingered on each other, silently judging what the other was wearing and could practically hear you doubling over in laughter.. “What a subversion!” Subversion. That’s the word that’s been niggling at me this whole time. It’s a subversion of expectations, isn’t it? It’s what should be love at first sight. An upper class girl and a lower class boy, her swaggering into Starbucks with her LV handbag and Prada shades and him working the espresso machine. But that’s not how it is. They abhor each other.
Maybe it’s more realistic that way. The first time we met, there was so much about you that pissed me off. The way you carried yourself, fiery passion brimming behind your words even as your eyes coolly gazed over everyone in the room. I remember you telling me, over cheap 2 for 1 beers at some crappy dive, that in me you saw the opposite. That I was tight-lipped and tentative, each precious word coming out of my mouth spilling out like drops of ambrosia. I used to love the way you could spin words from nothing to make magic. Everytime I try it’s like I’m drawing blood. I wish I had your gifts. I wish I had you.
But it’s not about me, it’s about the story. About Diane and Chester, who hate each other. They hate each other because it’s what they know: people of a certain class and caliber, like baristas and heiresses, don’t belong together. So when someone comes in with one type of attitude and the other person is their polar opposite they clash. Sparks fly. It’s the metaphorical fight to end all fights. I wasn’t sure whether to compare it to Hannibal and Scipio or Darius and Alexander, so I turned to where you’d usually be sitting in the corner and remembered too late the empty space I’d be greeted with. Part of me hoped to see the chair creak to life or swivel, just an inch or so. Just enough for me to pretend that you’re still here. Like if I stare long enough you’ll tap me on the shoulder and you’ve just been hiding for six months.
As the story continues hatred turns to begrudging respect, proximity developing into familiarity. What was hate becomes acceptance, as the patterns of life begin to rebuild themselves around a presence that has become familiar. Not intimately, not passionately, not with moonlit meetings and whispered secrets. Instead it’s a closeness built on remembering she always buys a slice of banana bread with her coffee, or that he likes to whistle opera as he works. Like the way you’d thoughtfully tap pen to paper once, twice, three times as if trying to summon up the words to carry on with your latest novel. They try to spend a little more time with each other, the ripples of their lives resonating outwards until each finds themselves in the arms of the other person. So it did become a romance, at the end of it all, without it really meaning to. I know that’s how the best romances happen.
Then Chester passes away suddenly. It’s a tragic accident, a very sudden thing to do with a rainy night and an all too slick highway. A cold dose of reality. I realized upon writing the words “He’s gone” that I don’t know how that would feel, to lose someone I loved without any sense of warning. The day your death sentence was proclaimed I’d already started to mourn you. Maybe it was better, in a sense. There was closure. Finality. The feeling that at least this way we could say our goodbyes. But at the same time, I had to grieve for you every day. And I know it’s not fair because I wasn’t the one whose hair was falling out, who was in constant pain and feeling every last part of them fade into something else. I know it’s selfish to make this all about me. But you’re dead and I’m alive, and all I have left is my resentment and the bittersweet memory of you.
So right now this is a story without an ending. I’ve got the shape of it in my head, or at least the hazy chalk outline of it. Diane has to live in the world without Chester, has to wake up every day next to the cold side of the bed remembering she has twenty-three hours and fifty-nine more minutes of living before the cycle starts again. She has to go to the coffee shop and remember that her coffee’s being served by someone else, someone who has to ask her to repeat the order and who doesn’t put a little extra on top. She has to keep living, and so do I, but neither of us knows what that feels like yet. Where that goes to. Only that it goes onwards without any path in sight.