The God of Endings

by Jacqueline Holland

Suddenly I couldn’t think what people were for, couldn’t think what their lives amounted to besides misery. Like a bird, I looked down from high treetops at all the wretched villages of men and felt only blank confusion. Those pitiful beasts, I would think if I were a bird, those poor, sad creatures dragging themselves along the ground, passing their days laboring and fearing and suffering until death. Too clever to live in peace, too stupid to live well. They’re better off in the dirt, finally quiet, finally peaceful.

How curious it is that in nature, the most vibrant colors are those that precede death. The delicate pinks and blues of spring are wan in comparison to the dramatic crimson of the hawthorn berries or the bloody gashes of the buckthorn leaves in late November. Stars blaze pale in their infancy, but in old age they melt and simmer in reds and oranges just as the oaks and maples do. Youth, it seems, is a state of diffuse abundance, while death’s approach concentrates.

“The seasons are doors. The seasons are windows, opening and shutting one after another,” Vano says. “There is a truth unique to spring, unique to winter, to fall, to summer. No act of spring can occur in fall. Winter is for dying, descending, hiding, forgetting. For being emptied of all we have, in preparation for receiving something new. The ages are this way as well. Only the occurrences of this time are permitted to occur. The events of tomorrow are never early. Nothing comes to pass late.”

Justice was a private matter that you didn’t expect anyone to execute for you. You did it yourself, or it didn’t get done.

seems, unfortunately, that nothing can protect you from your own mind, your knowledge, your memories. The harder you fight to keep thoughts out, the harder they pound the battering ram to get in.

Everyone must decide for themselves whether this world and life in it is a kindness or an unkindness, a blessing or a curse.”

“To have nothing is impossible. A person may have little if they set their mind to it. More often, though, they are simply not aware of what they have.

the taking of anything sets into motion its eventual loss; nothing that is can resist becoming what was; to begin presumes the acceptance of an end.

None of us gets the perfect love we ought, but maybe that’s what life is for, to give us time to collect it in bits and pieces, a little here, a little there. Maybe we’re supposed to put it together ourselves slowly.”