It was a reading day.
These are my favorite kinds of days. When my nose is deep into a book and nothing else can stop me from turning page after page after page.
Seven hours, a few bathroom breaks, and a pause to eat dinner… I’ve managed 200+ pages today with about 30 pages left in the book. I’m finally at the ending, and I’m trying to slow down to savor this last bit of the lives of these fictional characters.
Which is kind of ironic, because I already know how it ends.
I knew how it ends before I even hit 100 pages.
My toxic trait is that I’ll always skip to read the ending. Always.
The last sentence. The last paragraph. The last page. The last chapter. Whatever it is, if it’s the end I’ll read it. That’s how I knew Harry Potter would have kids. That’s how I knew Astrid would give up her life of luxury. And right now, that’s how I know Carrie Soto will lose to Nicki Chan.
I just need to know how it’ll all wrap up. Will it be a happy ending? Will the two characters who are clearly in love finally end up together? Will someone die? Will it all be ok?
Knowing the end helps get me through the whole book. Regardless of the ending being what I wanted or not, I’ll always go back and keep reading from where I left off. But at least now I know what to expect. I know that regardless of storyline shifts, Finlay and Nick will still end up together. So I can get through all of the hard parts- where they fight, where there are secrets, where they break up, where they get back together, where they break up again- all because I know at a certain point it will all come to a close. In most cases (except for The Last Thing He Told Me), a happy close.
And in every chapter of my own life, I’ve always just wondered how it will end.
High school and college were easy. Graduate high school and go to college. Graduate college and get a job. Eight years of my life where I knew exactly how it was going to end.
But now- as an adult- I have no idea how this will end.
I don’t know how much longer I’ll want to be a teacher for. I don’t know how many more years I’ll be able to get by living in Hawaii. I hardly know what I’ll be eating for dinner the next night.
But the one that cuts the deepest is the one that isn’t my sole decision to make. When will I meet someone? As Anna from Frozen says, “the one”. When will I get married? And how much will it cost to have Waihole Poi Factory cater the wedding? When will I get to hold a feverish little Chloe and know that this child is mine and not one I’ll have to give back? When will I get there?
This last decade of my life has been one long chapter with seemingly no ending in sight.
There’s no page I can flip to, to see how it all turns out. There’s no last sentence to give me clues about what the ending will be. There’s not even a page count for me to know how much longer until I’m done.
And it’s been driving me absolutely nuts.
Because I need that thing to look forward to. Because I have to see what the grand finale will be like. Because I would like to solidify that everything is going to turn out all right.
Because I just want to know how this ends.