When important chapters of our life end, why do we always seek closure? Isn’t closure just confirming the heartbreak we already knew about? Does closure close old wounds or tear them apart even more? At some point in every girls life, this topic becomes an issue. It doesn’t matter how much you try to fill the void with wine and laughter with your girlfriends, you will always see your love life as a book and until you close the book that isn’t currently making you happy anymore, you can’t start a new, better one – one that makes for a much easier, light hearted, straight forward read.
Maybe you loved the book to begin with, or maybe you read it so many times it just became too predictable after a while and it finally hit you that the ending would never change no matter how much you hoped it would. Maybe the main character and hero of your story is actually busy reading another book altogether. Some people are closed books because they don’t crave to be read like some of us do and I firmly believe that you can go through lots of books before you find one that really fits, one that won’t make you over analyse every word on every page or keep re-reading old chapters. I think one day we are all destined to find one book that will eventually change our life, and every other book gets left on the shelf, fondly remembered, but rarely, if ever, opened.
Every person has different tastes when it comes to reading, and I think that’s the same with love. And yes, the majority of times we will go through at least one full horror novel in our life. Saying that though, that doesn’t mean every book before ‘the one’ is negative. Just because one book didn’t suit me, it doesn’t mean I didn’t fall in love with parts of it. Or sometimes, maybe things don’t fit because the book doesn’t deserve the love you have to offer, or maybe it was too damaged to even try to be read. You have to be more careful when handling books that are fragile and worn, and I think that’s the same with hearts. Even if the cover appears shiny and perfect, sometimes the inside pages are scribbled on and torn. What you first thought was a book that is fresh and had no history, is actually a book that is holding an entire past you didn’t know about, with pages left damaged and torn by people who read, half read, or simply flicked through a few pages of the book before you. Each page and mark is telling a story, and as you read deeper and deeper the paper cuts become more frequent.
I can honestly say now, as a young woman, there will always be one book that will be left on the shelf with the others, but this one is different. It may appear to be the same, but this one is full of bookmarks, folded pages and memories that are ready to be reminisced about whenever you feel like it. This book has seen you at your worst and best, and was given parts of you that no one else ever got to experience – full hold of your heart that was once full of a careless innocence. And even though the ending wasn’t as you imagined it to be when you first started the book, and even if it wasn’t a classic love story to the rest of the world, the story will stay with you forever. To the book you may mean nothing, but it’s okay for the book to feel like everything to you. You fell in love with every part of the book, even though to other people the story may be unimportant, and that’s okay. You can’t explain the effect it had on you or how it captured pieces of your heart like never before, but this feeling won’t last forever, will it? No, because I think someday we will realise the ending of the novel was like this for a reason.
Maybe there isn’t always a sequel, or a movie, or an understanding. Maybe some books are meant to end to leave you feeling empty inside and wondering what to do next, until you realise you need to transform your life because you don’t really want an old book after all. You want someone who will build you the shelf to store all these precious memories on and write you a whole new series of books, a series so good that you will become so engrossed in the new story that you will no longer want to visit the shelf anyway. He will take the time to read and study every one of the pages of your own story and will be able to recite all the highs and lows. He will read it again and again and never get bored, and suddenly your gut will just know that 3/4 of the books chapters are meant to include him after all. However, in general, you just need to be the hero of your own story because waiting for other characters, no matter how big or small, will mean you miss out on a lot of the adventure you need to experience on your own. And I firmly believe that when you’re least expecting it, there will be the biggest plot twist of all when someone walks into your life and you finally understand why the other books had to end.
Finding closure is important, and yes it’s hard, but it’s possible. It’s just about being strong enough to close the book and end the familiar comfort and security of it when the story no longer thrills you or awakens your soul to wonderful, magical things. Even if it wasn’t a whole book, maybe it was just a small chapter that can be left where it is and will have no future impact on the rest of your story. Sometimes heroes become villains, but sometimes we can also love the villains because we first fell in love with the hero they were on the first page. Once we learn to let go of the villains and come to terms with the fact that the first page wasn’t a true representation of the rest of the story, we can start to admire the pages inside rather than the deceiving cover and introduction.
