closure and its discontents

or, toward a theory of emotional refusal

I return, again and again, to the image: Marina Abramović and Ulay—performance artists, lovers, then exes—who walked toward one another from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China in 1988. The plan, initially, was to meet in the middle and marry. But the walk took seven years to arrange—bureaucracy, terrain, time itself—and by the time their boots met stone, the love had already come undone. Still, they walked. For ninety days. Through mountain passes and empty fields, through villages where no one knew their names, where children stared and old women offered boiled eggs. One footstep after another, against wind, stone, silence. They walked not toward union, but toward a parting.

The idea was: if people invest such effort in beginning a relationship, why shouldn’t its ending be just as deliberate, just as ritualized? If we throw rice at the start, shouldn’t we mourn with ceremony at the end? Because there is something admittedly meaningful in the idea that an ending, too, can be an act of care. Their ‘closure’ was not passive; it was cartographic. Recorded in blisters and sunburn. When they met—somewhere in the spartan vastness of Shaanxi—they embraced. Briefly. Then turned and walked away, not as lovers, not even as friends, but as witnesses to something that had once been enormous, and was now over.

(Marina Abramović and Ulay, The Lovers, The Great Wall Walk, 1988, China)

We imagine, often against our better judgment, the small poetry of coincidence. That one day, without effort or warning, the boy who once dismantled you with a sentence or a silence will reappear—perhaps beside a row of tea boxes in a dimly lit grocery store. Because we want to believe that even if the story failed us, the edit might be kind.

Yet most endings come like a white-throated sparrow crashing into clear glass: sudden, silent, and inconclusive. Mine was merely a phone call, a severance so clean it felt like surgery. There had been no grand monologue. No mythic pilgrimage. Just the efficient violence of his voice—calm, surgical. The sort of ending that doesn’t even bother to clean up after itself.

I remember sitting in my kitchen afterward. The light was honeyed, indifferent. By evening, I had played the same four Joan Baez covers songs six times. Dinner was one perfect cube of ice drowning in Old Monk. I didn’t text anyone. I could have—I had an entire phone full of lovely people with opinions and handkerchiefs who would say fuck him or you’re better off. But I didn’t want comfort. I wanted precision. I wanted someone to come into the room and name the exact shade of obliteration I was experiencing. I wanted—God help me—I wanted narrative. I wanted poetry, fire escapes, rain on the roof, a final word in a lover’s quarrel shouted through cigarette smoke. But what I had instead was this. An unstructured ache. Just another scene in a badly edited avant-garde film, where no one ever says what they mean and nothing ever gets resolved.

The cultural language around endings tends to focus on finality, on the door closing. Aristotle, in his Poetics, gave us the formula: the story must be whole and complete, with a beginning that leads to an end, and a catharsis waiting like a damp cloth at the finish line. But most of the endings we experience aren’t like that at all. They are porous, slow, porous again. I’ve often thought: the whole literary enterprise might be partly to blame. The way we were raised—some of us anyway—on Chekhovian bows, on the finality of last lines. Closure is a narrative expectation we have inherited from bad novels, pop psychology, and American optimism. Hollywood insists on these endings. On stylised closure.

Secretary (Steven Shainberg’s 2002 adaptation of Mary Gaitskill’s short story) is a classic example. Gaitskill disavowed it, and it’s not hard to see why—it takes what was complicated and makes it cute, full of symmetrical bruises, Edwardian furniture and soft-focus lighting. Debby, the protagonist, is an ‘anorexic self-mutilator’. She gets a job typing legal briefs, and suddenly her pain fits—perfectly, almost algebraically—into her boss’s hunger for control. And wouldn’t you know it? The punishment becomes courtship. The submission becomes love. By the third act, they are wrapped in a pink domesticity, the past all scrubbed clean, the knives tucked away. Debby stops cutting. She wears brighter colors. They smile across a breakfast table, as if the trauma had simply washed off with the dishes. It is the commodification of emotional aftermath—the idea that every ending should offer coherence, symmetry, or peace. That hurt, once “processed,” dissolves.

But that is not how Gaitskill told it. On the page, it ends in a kind of quiet drift: Debby alone on a beach, directionless, with no hand to hold. And in that hush, something shifts. The ending is not an ending at all—it is a dissolve.

Of her original ending, Gaitskill writes:

In the story, the heroine awakens to her masochistic sexuality and learns a hard truth: that she is a small, fallible container for primary force beyond her understanding. In the end, her self, that fetish object of anorexics and cutters, has become unknown to her. And it's not "such a bad feeling at all."

She had written a story about hunger. The film gave us cupcakes. What the film trades for charm—for sweetness, symmetry, a gauzy sense of resolution—is the peculiar dignity of not knowing. Of letting things remain uncertain. Unfinished. Chekhov, notably, rarely resolved anything. People longed, people miscommunicated, and the curtain fell. The modern novel was built, in part, on the idea that the world doesn’t sort itself out. Yet we’re told that personal grief, like economic recession, should be recoverable, resolvable, and made productive. The therapeutic-industrial complex prescribes ‘closure’ the way pharmaceutical firms prescribe SSRIs. We are told that conversations must be had, letters written, truths declared. In the name of health. In the name of “moving on.”

Yet what is moving on? Sometimes grief is a guest, yes—a grim little man who sleeps on the couch and smokes in the kitchen. But sometimes—sometimes it slips into your skin. Freud, with his neat little theories, said mourning ends when the libido detaches from the lost object. But melancholia, he said—melancholia is when the grief gets greedy. It doesn’t want to leave. It wants to live through you. You become its rented body. And that distinction has always haunted me—how sometimes we move on, and sometimes we become the thing we can’t get past. I think of Miss Havisham, ringed in gauze and stopped clocks, as a classical case of Freudian melancholia. Boarded windows. Wedding cake fossils. Her home, Satis House, functions as an architectural embodiment of melancholia: decayed, shut off from the world, preserved in a moment that refuses to die.

The notion that one might not “move on”—that a wound might remain open, unreconciled, simply part of the architecture of a life—goes against the emotional discipline of neoliberal society that asks pain be filed, like paper, in the correct cabinet; that memory be drained of its unruly excesses and slotted into a timeline. Melancholia—the refusal to reconcile, to forget, to move on—may be one of the last remaining spaces where the subject can refuse assimilation. We are trained to fear the figure of the woman who “hasn’t seen the sun since you were born”—not because she threatens us personally, but because she represents a failure to comply. She is non-functional. She is surplus. In a culture obsessed with visibility, she withdraws. In a culture of constant reinvention, she refuses to be “over it.”

This is one possible explanation for the widespread cultural obsession with closure. Often the impulse toward closure is not about truth or growth. It is about control. But to demand resolution is to confuse narrative convention with psychological reality.

Life, unlike bad literature, has no obligation to conclude. I asked my friend—who’s been orbiting her own breakup—if she thinks closure is real. She was smoking, half-wrapped in an old hotel robe, her mascara dried into small black commas beneath her eyes. “It is,” she said, exhaling. “But maybe it’s not a person. Maybe it’s the weather.”

At the time, it sounded like something people say when they’re trying not to say something else. But lately, I understand. I think she meant that closure doesn’t arrive through speech, or apology, or the clean logic of reason: the weather does not end, it mutates. Tomatoes split at the seam. Milkweed turns brittle. The sunlight grows articulate again. It’s the sky one morning after three weeks of terrible air, shifting just enough to let in a breeze. It’s the way your body forgets their weight before your mind does. And catharsis, real catharsis, has more in common with mildew than music.

In this way, I don’t think closure is entirely a myth. In her poem ‘For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further’, Anne Sexton writes:

Not that it was beautiful,

but that, in the end, there was

a certain sense of order there;

something worth learning

in that narrow diary of my mind

Closure, if it exists at all, is not a symmetrical dialogue but an asymmetrical monologue, often directed at memory rather than its source, in the “narrow diary” of your mind. Sexton finds not purpose, but shape—a different, less consoling kind of resolution. The point is how absence rearranges the emotional architecture of the person that’s left behind. To quietly understand, as Sexton does, that the worst of someone can finally be “an accident of hope”.

And so, closure is rarely ceremonial. More often it arrives by accident—during a haircut, on a train, in the middle of washing dishes. You forgive someone, maybe even yourself, in the middle of eating toast. You don’t even notice it until the butter melts. One doesn’t need the other party to show up, like Ulay and Marina showed up for each other. I’ve thought about that. How careful they were. How precise. As if, by drawing the ending just right, they could exit cleanly. No splinters. No blood.

(Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, 2012)

And yet, twenty years later, in 2010, at the Museum of Modern Art, something ruptured. Abramović sat at a table performing The Artist is Present, her gaze locked with strangers. And then—Ulay. Unannounced. He sat before her. She looked up. The rules of the piece broke down—quietly, imperceptibly at first, and then altogether. Something untranslatable passed between them—what Barthes might call the punctum, that sudden sting of the real inside a controlled image. A wound, long cauterized, briefly opened again—not to injure, but to breathe. Which is all to say: they still bled. So what was closure, then? The walk? The gaze? Or both? Or none?

It no longer feels necessary to speculate. I increasingly like the idea that grief can have multiple interpretations. That it can be revisionist. That it has moods. It shifts depending on how much sleep you’ve had, how much bourbon you’ve poured, whether the sun is hitting the window just right or not at all. I no longer need it to teach me something. I only need it to be honest. And thus, closure may simply be the ability to live inside the question.

Parts of life never resolve into the fluency of clean insight. There are feelings I have felt that were so raw, so sublingual, that any attempt to name them would break them open. And yet they stay. They stay in your clothes, in the seams of your coat. I’ve got a tartan I wore last December—threadbare, heavy, faithful. It still smells like the bergamot attar I dabbed on my wrists when I was around him. He noticed that. Always.

But now? Now there’s a second smell. Mothballs. The scent of time, of closets, of things forgotten and folded and maybe never quite clean again. One scent says: Remember how it felt when he looked at you like that. The other says: For God’s sake, get your knitwear dry-cleaned. That’s love, I think. That’s grief. Two scents woven together—perfume and repellent.