I Need Closure

If you say that you need closure, then you are usually referring to an unresolved situation. You need a clinching - I think that is the right word. A catharsis, perhaps, or a purging. So that you can go on and forget about whatever the problem happened to be. Whether it be a bereavement or a lovers' schism - or even, shall I suggest, your own death.

I can see you looking askance, as if you are telling me the obvious: that one's own death is the final closure after which there can be no further closure.

Do you remember the first time I met you? We were somehow under water, two words, under(space)water, not underwater one word; if it's one word it's like a description, an underwater craft or an underwater event, a label, an occasion, a piece of equipment, like a submarine or a snorkel or a fish, underwater fish, as opposed to mermaids who sometime bask on rocks; whilst under water as two words is a position you are in, a state of being, a deliberate act, an immersion, a held breath, a mouthing or miming of words that neither of us could hear as we goggled at each other under water, under the water. I could tell you were trying to smile, and so I tried to smile back, bubbles emerging all around our faces. That was among the happiest days of my life. Yours, too, you once told me. And you didn't often come out long enough to tell me anything!

But I must continue with what I was saying. About the need for closure. You see, I need closure about losing you. And only you can give it to me. I stare across the sea everyday, walking upon the high-heaped beaches between the fishtail groynes, watching the pattern of waves making shapes that often look like you.

I ever return home, having not reached such closure. One day I will reach it, I am sure. You will not let me down. So, I return here, to my home not far from those high beaches and fishtail groynes, and I seem to listen interminably to symphonies composed by Bruckner and Mahler. My favourite Mahler is the 'Farewell' from his 'Song of the Earth'. I can imagine you singing it devastatingly - begging, simply yearning for your own personal closure. And I yearn equally to hear your real voice singing it. But I have obviously never heard your voice under water at all, and very rarely heard it, if at all, anywhere else. A desolation, more than anything.

These later days, I can hardly walk as far as those beaches, even though they are very close to home. So I fill the bath, and then unceremoniously put my head under the water remembering the words I need to say. An underwater death, an underwater love. Closure's closure.

I hope against hope that you understood me, among the bubbles that my breath did otherwise break. You see, it was a song, a song perhaps that you indeed saw but did not hear.