Conclusions: A/B Closure in Higher Order Primates

The subject has come up a bunch of places lately.  I think it’s just the spring time.  Soon, you’ll start seeing relationship advice leading the Yahoo header istead of celebrity gossip or political news.  People get flight in the spring, which I guess is normal.  Maybe it isn’t right, and maybe it isn’t nice, but if you’re going to leave someone, you never seem to do it in the cold winter when you need their support or comfort.  I’m not much of a leaver, as that would require me to be a commiter, but I can observe the actions of others.  And so you feel the pull of life and you leave, never to look back or some such bullshit Lifetime Network philosophy.

This is what I don’t understand:

Why is closure necessary?  Not closure as far as leaving and calling it over.  That is easy.  I have been on both sides, and the easiest part is calling it over.  It’s like figuring out someone is dead.  It’s easy to tell.  They are no longer alive.  It’s harder to find this nebulous goal of closure.

To me, there are two(2) ways to handle it.  One is the way men handle it more often than women (Type A), and the other is the way women handle the burden more often than men (Type B).  Not to say that one is the male and one is the female way to attain this closure.  We’re all people more than we’re the product of our reproductive plumbing and I’m sure we all do both of these throughout our lives.

So, Type A Closure:

No drama, just pretend they died.  This sounds dumb, but it really works.  Just forget they still breathe.  That they still live and love and fuck or any number of those things you imagine them doing with anyone but you.  Hard to be jealous when the person does not exist.  In this case, closure, strictly speaking, is really not necessary.  It just sort of happens because the person you miss is dead and buried and you grieve and then remember there’s still a lot of wine and lonely girls, in the words of a wise man.

Type B Closure is complicated.  You need closure.  The curtain must fall.  The lessons must be learned.  The character arcs need to terminate on a y-intercept where they only matter as lessons learned, puppies loved, etc.

Horseshit, in other words.  Type B is total horseshit, and often results in cruelty.

The closest I have been to Type B closure is when a girl left and I found the roots of my belief system all over again.  For a while, I was a Theravada Buddhist, and in all honesty, still live that way.  Not the crystals, vegetarianism,  and incense bullshit new-agey Buddhism of most Westerners who want to feel some ancient moving something.  The easiest way to describe the belief system I have would be to say that it is appreciative atheism with codified methods to reduce suffering.

When she left, it took a while, and some bad decisions, to remember the realities of being mortal.  Attachment is bad.  I forgot about impermanence, and it led to suffering.  So, I got back into it.  I started focusing on presence.  I started believing again in the truth of the falling away of everything.  Even the rocks, as eternal as they seem, are records of extinctions and death and of the dismantling of even older rocks.

So, it was not closure, so to speak, it was just picking up my fuck up and moving on.

The girl on the other hand, she needed Closure.  Now, the worst part about Type B closure is that you don’t have it until you dismiss the other person from your one person melodrama with an audience of mirrors pointed at the stage.  So, you are not able to treat the other as dead.  You have to tell the person how great you are without them.  You have to let them know they don’t matter.

And the girl found reasons to stay in touch and when we talked, she would let me know how much better she looked with all her time working out or how happy she was with the New Guy who was nothing like me.  And how she was richer.  And how she had all the time in the world in this new spring time of freedom and love and flowers and rainbows.  And how she could never have had that with me.  It hurt, but I guess I knew what she was doing.  I don’t believe in karma, as that is not an espoused doctrine in my Buddhism, but I do believe in suffering, which is always to be avoided and never, ever caused if you can help it.  I just took her bullshit and let it hurt, and then started over the truth in my head that she had just died, never left.

She got her tidy Type B closure, I think.  But I have a feeling she still feels me in her bones sometimes and in her one person play with the curtain never falling on her Next Big Act.  Just like I used to when I cared about my imaginary play where the hero writes, directs, and produces.  And all the supporting cast is there to further the narrative of the One Who is Unknown finding some fucking thing or other.  I have never been happier than when I let the narrative go.  When I give up on trying to make my life mean anything greater than existing and when I quit writing subscripts and little notes in the margins.

And so she walked out of my life forever.  Curtain.  Short intermission, then Act 312,002.  Fuck that.

We’ve all left or been left or been generalized shitheads of high order to one another.  Fuck that.

Hear the bell toll, my friend.  The truth doesn’t have a conclusion.