Sometimes, late at night, I let my mind wander to places I avoid during the day. To different lifetimes, full of different ways of thinking and mistakes not yet to be made. Lessons not yet to be learned. I think about beginnings…and I think about endings.

It’s easy to spot where things begin, but I’ve found it’s often difficult to recognize when they’ve ended. To pinpoint that exact moment in time when realization sets in and the colors, textures and sounds of your life come crashing down on you, leaving you with unseen bruises that keep you up at night. The mind combs its memories, looking for the conversation, the action, the lack of response that marks the end of what came before, but it blurs like paint on canvas. There were too many actions, too many conversations, too many words offered up in preparation. You can’t settle on just one.

Does that mean it isn’t over? Does that mean that the door remains cracked and unlocked, beckoning you open and reenter? Does that previous life, even now, invite you to once again step within its comfortable embrace, reminding you of how much you have put into it and promising that it’s not too late to bring what you couldn’t bring to the party before?

No.

Because then you remember. Then you grasp on to the moment. It wasn’t a conversation. It wasn’t an unreturned kiss or smile. It wasn’t a moment of infidelity or announcement of someone new. None of those were the end. The end was when you came to her house afterwards and realized your toothbrush, the one that she had gotten for you to use when you came over, was gone.

The door is shut, so we look wistfully at its frame and the warm light that seeps through the windows around it, and we turn and move on into the night.