this is loosely inspired by atwood's happy endings — metafiction is so fun to play with.
(1) You are standing on a street full of houses, all the doors wide open, a lone figure inside. Which one do you move into?
(2) You meet them in a party in Brooklyn, and you see them and instantly feel compelled and it's stupid and brilliant and foreign with the immediacy of it. They feel foreign yet familiar at once. You're taken by them because they make you forget your plainness, the reality that you are a generically privileged tech worker playacting unwellness, and they're so untethered from it all, and you're charmed by how they keep asking you what a product designer is, and taken by something silly like their collection of scratchy records or your shared interest in Yoko Ogawa, because it makes you feel literary even though you are quite tepid about her books in practice, and enough strange things align to feel like fate. There's no physicality behind it, they just seem interesting, and thinking back you cannot even remember what they look like. And it's all quite absurd how none of these qualities really matter, but you are young and allowed to be swept up by the abstract heat of it. It's one of those experiences you are sure you will be ruined by, but you are a romantic in the right conditions, and you go for it anyway. You are always compelled by a good story. You do all the things crazed on the ecstasy of connection, like sampling strange drugs and stripping each other down and painting over your bodies, and a bit of the oil paint gets in your mouth and the bitterness of it makes you feel alive. And you have always been obsessed with subjecthood, but for brief moments you feel safe enough to crave objectification. You quit your jobs (no visas in this universe!) and travel the world, a string of photos in Bangkok and Paris and Berlin, feed off of one another's output and turn each other into muses and idle your way through art museums, fueled by an unexpected windfall of a late cousin who hit it big in crypto. For the most part you are perfectly thrilled, all desperate passion and linguistic sparring and stomachs clutched in laughter, writing shitty poetry and riding the high of something as inane and desperate and performative as Marina Abramovic and Ulay walking across the Great Wall of China in a final eulogy to their relationship. When the money runs out you market snippets of the relationship online and gain a small following, because everyone loves a little escapism, and you struggle with the parasociality of it all. And reality comes crashing down, the complete lack of structure, the burning of savings neither of you have, but it's just logistics, and there is a sparse charm to the cramped little studio you share, and a conspiratorial fun to stretching your paper-thin grocery budget, and you either learn to deal with it or you don't. The rest continues in (a) or (b), depending on the optimism of the reader.
(3) You meet in the plainest of ways possible, in a classroom, on some dating app, at a work conference. There was nothing sudden about your interest, it was slow and careful and utterly mundane. Maybe you were friends for some time and after a long period of isolation both of you exchanged a glance and shrugged and decided to try things out, and the stakes don't seem too high anyway, you are lukewarm about each other, and somehow you fall into a routine. He's attractive in the way that never really appealed to you, a clean-cut study of symmetry, and you feel a little guilty you can't appreciate it, and maybe he doesn't like your septum piercing either, but on the whole your family is satisfied. And if you can make it past the clash in vibe there is good banter and genuine care and a willingness to make space for you. There's a sturdiness about him that would've bemused you in your youth, but now it brings you comfort, the way he sits and talks with steady excitement about his latest woodworking project or your daughter's latest 100m freestyle record or the pre-college program your son has gotten into, dual income mortgage payments and all. You are seated across the dinner table with clasped hands and a wry smile and marvel at how you spent your younger days rebelling against domesticity. You remember pondering with friends over the people settled in marriage, how many things needed to align, your cadence of annual-at-best interest, the stretch of time widening each time, because surely you couldn't date someone less compelling than whoever you have been with before. You are where you are because you stopped holding your breath, waiting, arms stretched, gave up on toying with queerness and subversion and surrendered to your parents' sigh of relief when you bought a home and started a family and did all the things you weren't sure you could. And maybe his mind doesn't intrigue you the way you would've liked and his eyes glaze over when you show him what you're working on and there's polite distance and separate bedrooms and lots of time holed up in your own worlds, and it really is more functional than anything else, but you look at him and feel some sense of home, and maybe that is what matters in the end. The rest ends here or continues in (a), depending on the optimism of the reader.
(4) You reunite with a dear friend in a city that you have forgotten, and you trade stories of love and friendship and heartache over drinks, the wine loosening your lips, and you commiserate over your loneliness, over feeling a little tired and worn out and used even though both of you are very young, but you have been shaped to believe that women expire at 30 and that leaves you feeling like bags of fruit with bruised spots picked over so carelessly at the market. You make a pact to be platonic life partners if both of you remain single by age XX, and you date and wander and bring your respective partners to your shared home, which turns into a sprawling playground stuffed with knick knacks and odd bits of play, and for a while you exist as a strange mishmash of a household, something in between a coliving space and a quartet. You are as monogamous as they come, but you tell her maybe you would be happiest in some sort of bidirectional polycule, like a cozy friend group on steroids, to alleviate the pressure of a single person meeting your needs, and she laughs and tells you yesterday you were convinced you were asexual, reminds you of your failure at finding a singular partner, and you scowl because you know this, this is all theory, so it is her you collapse back to, existing in the steadiness of domestic friendship. Maybe you adopt a few cats or geckos or rabbits or humans, and you raise them. And there's all sorts of rich conversation on crit theory and anarchist feminism and tender emotionality, but there's an undercurrent of something missing because she's maddeningly straight, or aromantic, or just a misandrist tired of men, and at the end of the day you do desire passion, but there is a steadiness in your attachment that's hard to achieve in romance, and maybe you are happiest this way. The two of you have your third eye open, you joke, outcasted from the general populace, but perfectly shaped for one another. The rest ends here or continues as in (a), depending on the optimism of the reader.
(5) Or maybe nothing pans out in the end. Maybe you went all in on (b) and the statistical improbability folds in on you. You're too tired to date and too prideful to settle, and you do what you've loosely planned and visit the adoption center and pick out the kid who seems the most in need of help, and for a while you have each other, and you're not sure who needs the other more, it's a bit like nursing a wounded animal, all bared teeth and bristling fear, and you watch her slowly unfold. You watch as she struggles against the elementary school pecking order and you break when the kids are cruel, and there are angry calls to teachers and profanity leveled at careless parents, but you stand up for her the way you wish someone would have stood up for you. And there's some codependency, as there often is when there is care, and really attachment is not such a dirty word, it's how we find meaning, and maybe if you internalized that a bit more you wouldn't have ended up here. She grows into a brilliant cartographer, though you're not quite sure how, geography was your worst subject, it springs out of her from some foreign place, and you delight in that, because it means you have not succeeded in molding her, the way you felt molded when your mom barged into your room over eleventh grade course selection and insisted you take computer science and you brushed her off, saying you wanted to be a psychiatrist, only for you to end up in tech anyway. And eventually she moves out, and everything repeats for her as in (2) or (3) or (4) or (5), depending on her temperament, and you comfort her after each go around until things work out, and you are alone again, but it is not so bad, the highs not so high but the lows not so low. You go back to making, fill your spaces with daydreams, of people you have encountered, and wonder what would have unfolded if you had sunk your teeth in a little more, pushed past that last argument, the one that left you bedridden in grief, or ripping out your hair in frustration, or rolling over with pained numbness. You write about all these abandoned futures, spilling out of you with curiosity and grief and acceptance, and a thousand lifetimes pass you by. After all, you have never been alone, with all your ways of entertaining yourself. You form a steady pair, you and your mind, and you know the latter was not birthed in isolation. You are as porous as they come, leaking bits of humour and passion from everything you have consumed and every person you have cared about. You regurgitate it now in this story, weaving them into this strange web, exploring every path with abandon, thinking about how memories are finite but imagination is boundless. You wrote about it, so you have lived it, and maybe that is enough.
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(a) You are 1, 3, 5, years into this when suddenly it becomes clear that your paths have diverged and the gulf between your values seems irreparable and you do not even realize how it has happened, which is strange because you are quite malleable in love, but it has become obvious after exhausting every path that the two of you are always brushing up against each other's wounds, or you open their phone to a string of texts from someone else and realize the person in front of you was never who you thought they were, or maybe both of you were excellent communicators and the death of the situation is not a surprise but one of slow and weary acceptance, and you were too busy living in fantasy to have repaired it with something as tactile as therapy and medication would have blunted the landscape of your experience, some of these or all of these or none of these. And maybe you promise to remain in each other's lives, and for a while you do, and there's forever a thread that ties you and the other person, because if they needed you someday you think you would still show up. And the rest ends here or proceeds as in (c), depending on the optimism of the reader.
(b) Or maybe you have it mixed up, and things really do work out, because it turns out you can mix and match intensity and stability and find someone in that rare intersection of kindness and passion and constancy, that fills you with desire and this gooey sense of luck to be sharing in their presence, but also a plaintive steadiness, because they've worked on themselves enough to not be paralyzed by intimacy or abandonment or engulfment, and they treat you with consistency you hadn't thought possible, and it was a labourious process of years of mutual struggle and lots of tearful nights made sweet by the outcome and you sink into their presence like it's natural, you don't even worry, because it's obvious you're meant to be in each other's lives for a very long time and make art and love and everything in between, your bond rendered irreplicable by virtue of the time you have spent together, you can't imagine anything else, and it collapses into something light and soft and hilarious and gently nourishing. You believe it deep down to be possible, that's why you keep rolling the dice, that's why settling for (3) feels like absurdity, but you try to temper yourself with realism. And everything ends here (?), depending on the optimism of the reader.
(c) And if you haven't had enough of the cycle, all of it continues from (1), and it fascinates you, the way you can be chewed up and spit out over and over and still be willing to try again, mouth stupidly open, waiting for someone to spit in it. You feel it again, that relentless optimism, the way every connection feels ripe with perennial newness. You are always able to say you've tried.
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Now for speculative pasts?
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