127 pages in...
but how do you end something like this?
This painting is part of a remarkable 4-piece set in homage to the elements, but I’m focusing on Water right now because that’s the central reoccurring theme throughout my current project. What’s surprised me about its structure so far as that, while the story itself covers a specific period of time and therefore has a beginning, a middle, and an end, the events do not unfold in chronological order. A few pages in, you know how it ends: what you don’t know is why.
It occurs to me for the first time now that I, the narrator, also don’t know why. The ending to this story was wrenching, about as hurtful as it could have possibly been for the two main characters, and I can’t account for that. With as much love and trust as drove the events before the ending transpired, I would have thought that there would have been a way to wrap things up more softly. No lashing out, no demands, no revenge fantasies. And yet the end of the story that we’ll call the source material was nothing but lashing out, making demands, and, at least from where I stood, revenge fantasies so vivid and constant I almost forgot they weren’t real.
This narrator’s got some problems. They’re likely not the type you want to reel in with all that you’ve got, pull in as close as you can apart from literally merging into one and then walk away from, saying there was nothing beneath these shared waves worth diving for anyway. This story has elements of a classic ocean-centric myth, except that the main characters disagree on which of them was the siren and which was the innocent sailor just trying to navigate his way to an expectant land for some scheduled trading. But the siren, by definition, is the pretty one. Put us side-by-side and I promise, the pretty one isn’t me.
I go back and fourth on whether this story is the discovery of Atlantis or the discovery of a shipwreck. Maybe both. Couldn’t a crew of innocent souls met their death before descending to that hidden civilization? I can’t tell if it’s a story of sublime abundance, the pink shell cracking to reveal Venus, or extraordinary loss, like the ship that God himself couldn’t sink doomed with one narrow turn.
Maybe we’re just fish pouring out of the shells not even sure where we’re going or why exactly we’re going there, we just got so caught up in spawning ideas that we didn’t think to chart a path or avoid baited hooks. I’m getting the sneaking feeling that we baited one another and then we stared at each other with bleeding mouths, feeling betrayed. We insisted we lived to set each other free but neither of us could fully forget that we could easily become someone’s meal.
Both of us, in our own ways, decided that in a world that’s bound to eat us anyway, I’d rather your teeth than theirs. But that doesn’t mean we were going down without a fight. We both got caught in the belly of a whale and we sat in that darkness for untold time. But we’re never going to agree on which one of us was the woodcarver and which one of us was the whale.
We’re never going to agree. This is why I struggle with the ending; I have nothing to persuade, nothing I hope the casual observer or anyone involved will take away. We are never going to agree. But can conflict itself become an effective resolution?