Like The River

On endings and clean lines.

Hi Folks,

Once, in her poem, “We Should Be Well Prepared”, Mary Oliver wrote the following lines:

“The way the river water rushes by, never to return. The way the days go by, never to return. The way somebody comes back, but only in a dream.”

In these lines I am thinking of endings. This year, at times, felt as though the end was always here, a sloping hillside, a cliff continually falling, hitting a new edge at each juncture. The end was, incidentally, endless. Just when I thought it was over, another point emerged, and we were in it again. It is like the river, which darts and curves, falling out of our line of sight, but never disappearing entirely. The river is consumed by other things; it becomes one with the rest of the water. It does not have an end, only multiple beginnings. I am thinking that I would like to be like the river.

This year has been full of many days. Like Oliver says, they have gone by, and now they are never to return. I feel I speak for many when I say that the days lately have felt indistinguishable, bleeding into another, and all something we push ourselves through one by one. I need the mechanism of individual days to survive the crushing mass of them, the fact that this year has felt more like a straight track into monotony and drudgery than any other. If you asked of me the difference between April and March, I am not sure I could give it. I fail to believe it is now May, a month that, if you are anywhere between the ages of 12 and 22 always feels rife with endings. In May is the close of the school year, the graduation march, the final walk through the gates. I have written before that this is the time of year that the world comes alive, but this sudden springtime is an ending as much as a beginning.

Any transition involves one thing becoming another. We understand this, or at least, our human brains have learned to. We have been forced— by the world, by circumstance, by death and disaster— to make sense of endings. I would go so far as to say we need them. That we rely on them to splice our life cleanly and give clarity to all its different periods and phases. Endings are a coping mechanism; what is more frightening, I believe, is the uncertainty. I like to think that I am as dependent on change as I am afraid of it, and if nothing else, endings offer a certain promise of change. If one thing is over, a new one can open itself up to me.

I am, I think, good with endings. When I have them, I am able to cleave my life cleanly in two (or four, or eight, or however many periods begin and close). But the doors that do not close haunt me. I am obsessed with possibility, of all the things that could have happened, or could happen still. I am not able to distance myself from situations unless there has been resolve, and I am learning as I grow older, that life does not like to give us that resolve. Life— and love and sorrow and trauma and joy and pain and goodness— is like the river. It seeps. It flows. It weaves itself into all the other lives we will live, all the other versions of ourselves we will be. It does not like to give itself over easily, and it does not like to break.

A year ago, I was meant to graduate from a place I had dreamt of attending my whole life. I was supposed to walk the stage and receive the diploma and then pack everything I owned into flimsy brown boxes and drive away from the city that had made me so sad. I spent months envisioning this ending, how it would feel: I knew the song that would play on my stereo as my car rolled over the bridge and the steel and brick of the city buildings fell into the background. I would roll my windows down and look out over the river, beyond the murk and to the trees, and smile. I clung to that image for far too long; I needed it to survive. And when I did not get that ending, when instead the world itself seemed to end, I could not remember how to go on. I could not remember who I was supposed to become if all these pieces of myself had to bleed together, one thing becoming another until I found a center within, a rock or a dam or a fallen branch to stop the water from flowing, flooding, and consuming me entirely.

•

The first memoir class I took in college changed my life, mostly because it taught me to think about my own stories and to see the power in sharing them. It was the first time I had confronted my southern identity, and reckoned with it in an important way. That class made me realize the value in sharing our voices, the revolutionary power that stories hold. But it also made me realize the importance of a good ending.

In the story of my life, I have been writing the ending since it began. There have been many versions of this ending, and many I am grateful to not have seen come to pass. But since I took that class at 19, there has been only one that I have held myself to. If my life was a book I was writing, I knew even as I lived out the middle of it that it could only end one way, and that ending involved me coming home. Coming south. Driving through the trees to wind back up at my mother’s doorstep. I have written this scene out so many times, played it in a loop on my head. There was comfort in the fact that I knew it would end like this, one way or another. There would be years of my life, beautiful years that I would live now, and then I would return to the place that made me, and like the wave sliding up the shore after cresting, settle.

And then, well, March hit and the world seemed to end again and again each day, for months on end. I came home for a weekend, and then a week, and then a month, and then five. When I left the city for good it was not in a car with all my belongings, on the way back to the woods, but on an airplane where the woman next to me wore a hazmat suit and a baby wailed behind me and I sat stick straight in my seat, afraid to touch anything. I watched as every plan I had fell not like dominos but like a game of jenga, scattered and unclean. I thought of the very first piece I wrote for that class, which included the following passage:

In my ideal vision of myself, I am driving a car along an empty highway as the sun beats down… I am powerful, free. Mountains rise in the distance and I press my foot harder on the pedal, adrenaline coursing. Some rock song plays in the background as I dial up the radio. I am envied. I am dangerous. And then the screen cuts to black.

I don’t know how to be this person or if I even really want to be, but that’s besides the point. The point is that this person fails to exist outside of the highway, outside of the movie clip where she dissipates into the distance and doesn’t come back. She goes where she knows nobody and nobody knows her and she isn’t afraid. In all the versions of myself I have ever known, she fails to exist. I go, but I’m afraid, afraid to truly leave this place behind, afraid of who I might become out there on my own.

In this version, I do the one thing I promised myself I never would: I come back.

I am still here.

•

Lately I have spent a lot of time driving over rivers and thinking about loss. I am writing a new book about a girl who suffers deep loss and goes in search of an ending, and so I will spoil the end for you now: she does not find one, at least not a clean one. Instead she must learn to live without endings, to let the loss bleed into the happiness and the happiness bleed into the love and the love bleed into whatever comes after.

It feels important to me to write a book about this, and especially to write a book set in the rural south about this, probably because so little of my time here ever had an ending. Growing up, as many kids in small towns do, I assumed I would leave and never come back. That my youth turning into adulthood would serve as its own ending, and there would be a clean break to it. I would go as fast and as far as I could, and I would miss nothing. This is a narrative sold to so many of our kids here, the idea that if you want to make something of yourself, see your life hit not a dead end but an open road, you must leave your town full of them, go where the highways turn from one lane into four and ride them until they wash you somewhere new and exciting. That the only places of opportunity are off out there where the trees turn to billboards and the billboards turn to lights and the city rests, glinting and still.

I like to think now that opportunity is within us. That part of my work in this life is to come back to the places that made me and find ways to carve those opportunities here. To learn that I do not have to leave in order to be made, or even to be made again. To learn that we are all more like the river, and we do not end.

Or perhaps, more than being unending, I think I would like to learn how to better live with loss. To carry it with me. To pour what has been poured into me into the others around me until we become cyclical, interconnected. Little streams into the ocean.

Thich Nhat Hanh offered this anecdote in the “Heart Like A River” section of How To Love:

“If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink. The river is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform. So the big question is: how do we help our hearts to grow?”

I would like my heart to grow as big as the river. I would like it to never end.

•

As a child, I was obsessed with the idea of dystopia, and especially all the young adult novels that wrote about the end of the world. I wanted apocalypse, disaster, the chance to prove myself as the heroine. The chance to prove I deserved to survive, and would. I was convinced that the end of the world would come soon, and that it would be unmistakable: a bomb dropped, a tower fallen, a desert razed. You are probably going to guess what I will say next, which is that I thought the end of the world would feel like the end.

There have been many reflections on last year being the end of the world, so I will save you another one of those. But I will say this: if it was the end, it was nothing at all like how I imagined. It was not singular, momentous. It was not all-consuming. It did not end; we are, in fact, very much still in everything last year brought, and even worse off. If this is the end of the world, I would like to argue that it is not an end at all, and with that, provided none of the comfort and cleanliness that endings do. Instead we are all being collectively forced to learn to live with this hollowness, this enduring suffering, this trauma, which can— and has— absolutely impacted our psyche. It is terrible in so many ways. I hope to god that one day this will end. But until then, if there is even a then, I will continue to turn to the river and the water and stretch out my hands, trying to remake myself in its spindly image: ever-reaching, ever-flowing, giving myself over to source.

I would like to leave you today with this quote from May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude: “Keep busy with survival,” she wrote. “Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.”

Your prompt this week is simple. Tell me about an ending. Was it clean, or does it still continue?

May we all find as much ease this week as the water bending around what blocks its path.

— Spencer

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This week’s song is I Know The End by Phoebe Bridgers. Pretty self-explanatory, but this is my favorite song of all time. Something in it cracks me open and makes me feel absolutely feral in the best of ways. It gets into that human need to make meaning out of loss, and especially in how endings oftentimes look like absolutely nothing at all.