Dead End: Again

After years or weeks or hours, some ends stay dead. Some don't. Some open up.

We should be so glad of this. The world we thought we knew is gone. Another's in its place. Or the world we thought we were is gone. Another in its place. New cells. New view from the window of the selfmade cell we've walled ourselves up in, as if the tower's somehow turned a degree or two without us noticing. New sense of snow, so physically and emotionally far from it, that whenever you see it you're chilled again as if by just the thought of you a couple years before, out in it and letting your skin cool to the temperature of soot, knowing that if you stayed long enough your tracks back to the house would be erased.

Whether it's the book you thought inert that spills another set of secrets years later, ideally your book, but more likely another book, say, Dickens, since you never liked Dickens when you were younger, you just couldn't stand him, and so you wrapped yourself in that dislike as if a cowl. You started to identify yourself by it, the you who never could like Dickens, the you that never read Hamlet. It was a merit badge. A badge of honor. An animal rooting in the trash. But when a decade past you found your way again to it, while staying in a hotel in a foreign land where you had finished all your books the month before, so anything in English you thought welcome, and when you opened it, it opened you up again--either way not all things that end stay ended. Maybe it's you that ended, closed yourself off to it.

It's okay. We all do it. We can't not. You slowly open yourself up to the essay. To Laura Branigan. To a comment someone made half a life before in college that you never bothered to look up or track down, a comment that somehow stayed in memory and found good soil these years later. You open yourself up to Bacitracin. David Floyd, though he was a fool, a goof, good-hearted, probably, he knew some small things and only now you know what they turned out to be.

Some of these ends are perennials, others annuals. You thought you'd always care about Douglas Coupland, Raymond Chandler, Virginia Woolf. Until you did no longer (well, you still care about the latter two, but won't sell off or give away Shampoo Planet even as you now know better--which means, you suppose, that you still do care about it, or at least care about your memory of caring about it and what that said of slash meant to you).

What a tight end means is open to discussion.

What an end-stop means is for this moment certain.

What a split end means depends on how much you liked the band Crowded House, or how long until you're going to go bald via medical treatment or genetic given. How much care you give your hair and how you believe it defines you. How much you'll do to keep yourself at least apparently the same.

Which is a way of saying that there are many points of termination. Long may they resist consolidation.