Beginning, middle and end

                                                     

When I started school I used to think writing was easy. All you had to do was start the essay with capital letter and finish with a full stop, adding the ideas in the middle. Later I learned for getting good grades on my essays they had to have a beginning, middle and an end. I do not know how, but this concept that things need to have a beginning and a well defined ending have followed the lives of many people.

“When I was 14 a boy asked me to go steady. It was a summer night and after dinner, while I was shooting the breeze with some friends, Dudu called me to the side and asked me. Later, when I went back home, at sleeping time, I had changed my “status”. There was no Facebook to post and announce the world, but from a moment to the other my life had changed, as if I had officially taken office and started, in that day and time, a new relationship. There was a clear change between before and after the proposal.

Falling in love with someone is a slow process. Intimacy and admiration grow with time and day after day the couple starts seeing each other as friends, lovers, accomplices. Clothing  and CDs begin to mix up. The couple has an urge to tell things to each other urgently and do not want to sleep alone anymore. Becoming a boyfriend or girlfriend should also be like this, with no milestones, formal proposals or watershed rituals. To find yourself so involved to the point you both feel your lives are intertwined and a loving partnership was made.

“When did we get married?  March 12th, March 29th, November 10th. Every single day, in the five years we were together, we got married a little. It means we started to get married the day we met.” Love does not have to be a story with beginning, middle and end. (Fabio Jr.).

The end of a relationship does not happen on a specific day either. The day the couple gets apart physically is not the same one they got apart emotionally. There is an intimacy which goes beyond the bodies and has to be solved. It is often the case of living apart, but souls are still connected and maybe even more common seeing that souls are already far apart while  bodies still touch, trying to recover something lost during the journey, or just to satisfy physical needs. Divorce papers are just a law formality. It is really hard to say when we gave up on loving, admiring and investing in the relationship.

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When the subject is feelings I wonder there is always a beginning but with no specific date. I also believe there is middle. The end just exists for those who do not realize the magnitude of the middle and the endless cycle of restarts and learning. The end of a love story is always the beginning of a new one. People say the crescent moon shows up every month in the shape of a comma to remind us we don’t need to put a full stop in every story, but just a comma. By the way, have you realized when we put many full stops, in a sequence, they become ellipsis?

I still write essays, I still start with capital letter, but I do not worry about metrics or grades anymore. Sometimes, like now, end mixes with beginning. What matters is the story being good and having content. When the words get dull, make no sense or there is no inspiration, it is always possible to start it all over, correct the mistakes and next paragraphs. This is the way I am writing my life, with no clear beginning or ending, but hoping and wishing to be on the right path.

Agradeço a Claudia Marques pela belíssima tradução bem como pela ajuda inestimavel na elaboração do artigo..