Allison's Archives

The tragedy is that there is no body to bury. The grass remains supple and green where a grave should gape, the soil undesecrated. The air will never be tainted by the smell of incense or the cries of mourners. There is only the incessant howling of the wind and a cleanliness of a slate well wiped.

In my dreams, the final page of the fairytale is glued shut. I have a feeling it is empty yet tear at it anyway. The page doesn’t yield and denies me the chance of writing my own ending. Then, who do you curse at? The paper? The author? The characters? There is something so cruel and awful about unfinished stories, their last breaths stretching across time and space long after they should have passed. A piece of the story makes a fool out of mortality and lives in the chorus of a grocery store radio, the bottom of a takeaway cup, the foot of my bed, the gap between almost and forever. We were almost good. Not extraordinary or once-in-a-lifetime. Just good. Good enough to see it through.

But almost doesn’t build empires or beckon comets. Almost has rendered us two strangers destined to orbit the same memories without ever again colliding. Will you call that loneliness? Will you call that punishment? Will you one day stop orbiting?

I chastised myself for reading too much. For stumbling across the right words to describe your wrongdoings. For realizing that this kind of love story has been told many times before, none of which are packaged in the ending I yearned for. For knowing that a minor character introduced in the beginning can grow into someone major at the climax. For thinking that if I romanticized us enough, reality would bend to match my narrative. But, and I say this with my hand on my heart, this was a story that should have never been penned in the first place. The ink should have never been ground. The scroll should have never been unfurled.

The blame is on me for believing that unfinished stories were tragic. Now, I know endings are merciful. The story stops because it has either reached fruition or because it has rotted beyond salvation. Even after your shadow has left my vicinity, I searched for an explanation in the margins of literature. The story, as far as it limped, had to mean something; all that time couldn’t just be waste. But there isn’t always meaning to be found; suffering doesn’t become noble and praise-worthy just because someone writes it down beautifully enough. Not all of us are star-crossed lovers; some of us are just cautionary tales. There is nothing poetic in the debris, nothing worth caressing in the damage.

The blank final page stared back at me all the time. I saw a house, a dog, a boy, and a girl. I saw bare feet in frigid waters and tall grasses. I saw a well-stocked kitchen and a sand pit in the yard. I saw firecrackers and thunderstorms. I saw books I have read and books you will never finish. I saw a piano and a barbeque grill. I saw fucking Montessori toy sets and charger plates. I saw a god damned trampoline and Dyson vacuum cleaner. I saw a life so ordinary that it made me sick. Because it was so achievable, so within reach. I wanted dedications and acknowledgements and footnotes! You were happy to leave things at a comma even when the next word was in front of you!

Do you know how humiliating it was to grieve what didn’t exist? Do you know how embarrassing it was that when the book landed in your hands, I had to watch you open the final page with ease and write over my name like it was a spelling mistake, like there were too many letters?

The tragedy is that there is no body to bury. Still, I teach myself to arrange stems and slaughter weeds. I lay flowers at the feet of the greatest love story that never was.

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_{The accompanying image (The Blessed Damozel by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1871 – 1878) serves only as a visual complement to the essay and carries no interpretive or illustrative claim beyond that.}