Poisonwood Bible

I’ve always been a big fan of endings. It seems like everyone these days is obsessed with starting new, with becoming another person, change, building, forgetting. Like a person who begins again is leaving behind something unutterable and inexplicable.

Me? I’ve always loved a good ending, because I think it says a lot more than a good beginning. People can say anything they want in the beginning but it’s who they are at the end that counts. And people who want to forget their ending are idiots because endings force us to start anew; there aren’t beginnings without ends. The fairy-tale nonsense we’re spoon-fed about books never ending, about lives never ending; it’s not true. Only the best things end, because only the best things are important enough to have an end.

That’s why I’m naming every single post after a book I’ve read. And not just any book, but a book of so-called “literary merit” (which is a ridiculous label considering it’s an opinion, but we choose our battles). I like to think the endings of those books are a lot like the endings we invent in our lives; not death, not really, but the times when we say “I want to be someone else”. Whether that signifies the start of a new time in our life or not, it’s an end, because the idea of change has been sown and we aren’t ever the same blissfully ignorant person we were before.

What better way, I thought, then to start a beginning with an end. At the risk of sounding patronizing, I think a little reality is a good thing for people (me included) who have been fed the strange, the harsh, the sugar-coated too long to realize that who we are in the end is more important than who we were in the beginning. I can honestly say I don’t write to be a reporter. I don’t write to tell people what to think, to communicate information they’ve never heard before. Perhaps tidbits they’ve never encountered, but certainly no world-shattering piece of privileged information. I don’t want to be one of those people who others read about and say, “Wow you’ve just managed to foist off your fanatical bull-headed opinions on me in less than five hundred words.”

Please, by all means, if I ever become that person, say so. The world doesn’t need another masked opinionated zealot. That’s one ending I don’t ever want to have.

That being said, I think I’ve just said more about myself in 409 words than I’ve ever managed to spit out on two dozen scholarship applications in five thousand words. I appreciate the subtlety, but by now anyone who reads this is probably thinking “Will she ever shut up?”

No, I will not shut up. That’s the thing about us opinionated-but-trying-not-to-be people. We don’t shut up, not when we’re 7 years old making stories about princesses killing dragons. Not when we’re 17 years old writing for a blog called “Strange Curry” because we know we’re worth more than the sum of our words. Isn’t that what people are always saying? We’re worth more, we’re always worth more, because we can string together the right letters to make the right sounds to convey the right meaning. And if we manage to slide in our thoughts like a needle, so much the better; we’re always worth more when we’re literate.

I’m almost 17 and I’m just waiting for the day someone calls me out at school for expressing myself a little too loudly, just so I can regurgitate the happy lessons we’re taught in kindergarten and smile when they ring a little too artificially. Does that make me cynical? I don’t think so. I think it just makes me a teenager.

Needless to say, I love school. I do. There are very few times I would rather be at school, but I still love it because when I fall asleep at night, if I’m not worrying about some friend drama or procrastinating on homework, there’s a strange feeling I get. Almost something close to happiness. The fact that I’ve been waiting for the end of high school for three years is beside the point.

Enough about me! More about…the other 99.9999timesinfinity% of the population who will not be reading the ramblings of two kids with dreams too big to stuff into little tiny words. The other kid being, of course, Anne, my Everything-I-Am-Not friend, as I call her in my mind. Athletic, occupationally ambitious, musically talented… Trust me, if I made a list my computer would crash from the massive space usage.

And so we come to a small end, like most ends. Like dead ends, and abrupt ends, and bookends (ha, ha). A small end like the end of a post and the end of each word that was written but may or may not be read. That kind of bittersweet conclusion, like at the end of a book. Which is probably why this post is called Poisonwood Bible (by Margaret Kingsolver). We all get what we want in the end, but it comes at such a price.