A happy ending depends on where you stop telling the story.
Sometimes I think that fiction is soothing because it posits there are solutions in this world, rather than just practices. You can do a thing and get to the end of it and have it be finished for good.
And in the real world there is so very rarely any such thing as closure, as things that end rather than transforming, changing, coming back in a different guise. The murder isn’t solved when the murderer is unmasked: there’s manhunts and arrests and trials and reasonable doubt and police corruption and appeals to get through. In Agatha Christie the murderer is just as likely to nip off and die by suicide as they ever are to come to trial, because it provides closure and a place to stop the book.
Meanwhile, here we are in the real world repairing roofs and mowing lawns and getting the house painted and weeding the fucking garden because the garden has to be weeded not just once and then it’s done forever, it turns out. No, you have to get out there every week or so and weed. Or else the weeds just kind of win.
A friend of mine likes to quote that “entropy requires no maintenance,” which always makes me think that entropy is thereby revealed as the only thing that requires no maintenance. Everything else, you’re constantly chipping away at, trying to keep the sea and the wind from leveling everything—at least in your own lifetime.
And in fiction, there is no entropy. Not really. When things break in books they break for reasons. Sometimes that reason is just to show that life is arbitrary and unfair and heroes die. but more often it’s thematic, or serves a plot purpose, and I think that is part of why fiction is such an escape.
We’re creatures that crave an orderly universe even as we live in one where one of the great truths is that things don’t happen for a reason, they just happen.
Because entropy requires no maintenance, everything we do becomes a practice, and a practice in the face of frustrating setbacks. It’s one reason, I suppose, why yoga or meditation can be so helpful for one’s mindset. They remind us that what we do (chop water, carry wood, as the joke about New England in the winter goes.) doesn’t have to have a permanent outcome—as much as I would like for what I do to be one and done, come summer the lawn is going to need mowing again and the bushes will need trimming.
And not just one and done either, but on a regular and repeating basis. So unfair.
It’s something to bear in mind, I guess.