No Perfect Endings

"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity." -- Gilda Radnerr

I know this, I've learned it so well in the past few years. Yet, I still wish the story had a clear linear path. I know they don't, I write stories after all. My life is a book that I have yet to write, it's in my mind as a jumbled mess. All interlinked so that there is no starting point, not my birth, not the moment I realized who I was, not the present nor the future. Each breath I take is not a middle part, nor is it the ending. The story goes on with those breaths. Each day is a blank page.

Despite this, I always wanted that perfect ending. I wanted something to wrap up all the pain, all the struggle. I wanted the fight to be worth it. Maybe it will be someday.

That day is not today.

We can't always have perfect beginnings. We can't all have prefect endings. But what we all have is brief, intermittent, perfect moments. I had a series of those moments a week ago. I had that joy, I held it in my heart for two weeks. It was almost perfect, it was almost a saving grace. Almost, but not quite. Does it count? From where I stand right now, it does not, nor has it ever. I know that in time I can look back and it will count, it will be a blessing I smile back on. But not today.

Maybe that's why it doesn't hurt so bad right now. I've weathered this storm before. I know that there is no point in fighting it, the end is here. I know that I will survive this. I know that there is comfort beyond the horizon. I will not sink into the swamp of sadness this time.

Maybe it's because I am still waiting to miscarry, maybe it's because I had all week to resign myself to the idea of it ending. Maybe it hasn't hit me yet... I don't know. I do know I am not falling apart like last time. I do know that I will pull through.

I am going through hell right now, but I will not stop here. I can not make hell my home again. I will keep going. Yes, it hurts, but I will keep walking, I will keep putting one foot in front of the other until I get to where I'm going.

Winston Churchill once said, "Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." I will sum up the courage somewhere within me. I will continue on. It took revisiting hell for me to finally realize this, it took me letting this pregnancy go, acknowledging that it is over, to finally know that I can try again. I will try again. I may not cross the same bridges I once thought I would, I may not be willing to continue fertility treatments to the extent I once thought I would... but I will become a mother somehow, someday.

And for that, it's worth going through hell.