The God of Endings

by Jacqueline Holland

The most buzzingly alive a person will ever be they are at three, four, five years old. Preschool is a line drive, a Slip ’N Slide, a mad dash to something else. Enjoy, but do not get attached. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow it all slips away to puberty and acne and angst. Once it’s gone, forget it.

When you spoke to him, he listened like a hunter listening for footfalls on distant grass, and nothing hidden by either false tone or false words could deceive him. To be near him was to feel that you stood naked and turned inside out, but he never betrayed the vulnerability that he, whether knowingly or unknowingly, extracted, like a poultice, from another.

“Mercy,” he said, “is like a rare and valuable treasure; to find it and possess it, one must act foolishly and one must risk danger. That’s what mercy is: loving your neighbor at risk to yourself, and that is what makes it so rare and so valuable.”

I put my lips to his and felt the breaking, the capsizing of some part of myself; it slid away irretrievably, lost into him, never to be separate and safe again.

“Such talent has my beautiful No one! She paints beside me, and her landscapes are so different from mine and yet still so true. It reminds me daily of all the many ways there are to see the world in front of you and to speak of it. It reminds me of my choices.”

Midsentence, midembrace, at the height of your hopes: that, you see, is when the god of endings likes to do it.

Art is a strange thing in that way. The artist must step away from the thing, create a thing that is not the thing, in order to express a longing for the thing. And somehow, in that, there is an experience—even if only the briefest taste—of union.

IT’S a strange thing to suffer in a beautiful city; the beauty of the place is made dark in the mirror of your pain, and your pain is made beautiful in the mirror of the city. Afterward, the memory becomes dreamlike, as full of turbulent passion as a doomed love affair, which in hindsight becomes lovely, though you know that at the time it was hideous and horrible.

“It isn’t that, Anya. Wrong, right, you’ve done them all. All the things you’ve done are a little of both. Wrong things come out right, right things come out wrong, then with enough time, they switch. Over hundreds of years, you see this. What are you to apologize for? In the confusion and profusion of it all, it is impossible to sort. The line cannot be traced.

“You don’t know anything about me,” I hissed wrathfully. “You like the way I look. You gaze into my blankness and imagine all sorts of wonders. They aren’t there. It’s your imagination, your poetry.

How presumptuous is the gift of life? What arrogance is implicit in the act of love that calls another into existence? This world, my love, I give it to you. All of it. You’re welcome, and I’m sorry.