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Parenthesis

If you are, as I am, both a writer and an avid reader, there are two habits you're likely to form. The first is that you'll start looking at all the people in your life as being characters in a story, and will find in them inspiration for the protagonists and antagonists and antiheroes of your own tales. The second is that you will remember the plots of novels or stories you've read, and find within them comparisons and similarities to situations in your own life. This has the charm of making one feel less alone - others have felt the same as you do, or faced similar predicaments. It does not necessarily increase clarity, however, nor resolve the problems you ponder. And a story is not real life - or is it?

It is this subject - the difference, or similarity, depending on your perspective, between fiction and nonfiction, which presently weighs on my mind. Specifically this is because I ask myself - at what point does one know when a story has ended? Is what lies before you an ending, or a simply a pause?

It is natural, I suppose, to ponder such things after a breakup. One has a choice then; move on and forget him, or go on hoping that a reunion of some kind, at which one either picks up where the relationship was left off, or starts building anew, is to come at a point farther down the road. That question, to give up or keep hoping, can tear a man apart.

I came here three days ago, to stay by the sea, because the ocean has always been a place of healing, a tonic to the soul. Alone in a beach house, a jackal can find long hours to think, to read, to experiment in the kitchen or wander the beach, feeling wet sand squish up between your toes, listening to the cries of gulls, wandering upon the shore with a wish in your heart that your hand was locked in someone else's, until the lonely nights when you fall into your bed and fall asleep wistfully to the distant crash of the waves, beating upon the shore with the same intensity as your own beating heart. I come here for the same reason that others go to mountains or forests or lonely cities too - to lose oneself and regain oneself in the same instant. And to find clarity, but it is never fast in coming.

Perhaps clarity is like love: to find it one must cease to search.

Before me there on the table is an old cigarbox in which I've kept his letters. Neat folds of notepaper, they spell the course of our affair, from those early exciting days of passion and discovery, to the more hectic days after our connection had been found out by others, until that last dreaded epistle I have read over and over, in which he put an end to it. Gazing now upon the box with half-drooped ears and mournful eyes, I can see the words again before my muzzle: 'someday I hope we can talk again.' Someday, but for the time being...goodbye.

It's that open door that weighs on my mind such, remembering novels, and movies, and songs...

A few years ago, when I was younger, shyer but more idealistic, an eager young jackal out to experience the world, I took a fiction writing class. Over the course of a semester the instructor talked, among other things, of the traditional story arch: building tension upwards towards a peak of conflict, from whence things fall back neatly into resolution, the protagonist's conflict resolved, or perhaps not so, in the case of tragedies. In stories the conflict is always, whether happily or unhappily, resolved - it must be so. As such I can remember so many stories in which a lover choses to end a romance against his or her own desires - perhaps it's a matter of honour, perhaps there's a religious conflict, perhaps their family opposes the match, perhaps one or both of them belong already to someone else, perhaps it's a question of money or location or war or simple convenience - the particular reasoning may vary, but throughout fiction you can find so many examples of a lover denying him or herself love, because in a misguided way he or she believes it is the most unselfish or honourable thing to do. Tragic yes, but without these denials there would be less conflict, and less story. Readers of novels, or watchers of movies, do not read or watch stories in which everything goes perfectly smoothly. Conflict is a necessity.

But is real life like that?

Invariably in those kind of stories the lovers do reunite later - sometimes they don't, but even if no relationship happens, they usually do meet again - a symbolic closing of the parenthesis, the which gives meaning to what's happened. That second meeting is always necessary, whatever the outcome.

But today as I sit here, wasting time I might be reading or beachwalking or going out for a drive down the coast, I wonder: does that neat kind of resolution ever happen to real people? When my lover tells me 'we'll talk again,' does that mean some hope still exists for our affair, that this episode is just a dark chapter, the which we'll later forget in the face of rampant happiness?

From a shelf on the wall I take down a novel, a romance I read last year, and flip through it. 'What is a classic?' one of the lovers asks the other. 'A classic,' comes the reply, 'is a basic canid situation.' And so it is: the protagonist of all stories is really the same, deep down; it's the everyman, it's all of us. At the high point of conflict in this novel one of the lovers writes a letter to her lover ending their affair - how familiar! - against her own true desires. Later of course she realises she cannot deny herself who she is and who she loves; they reunite, and at the novel's end they are beginning a life together. Can this be me, I wonder? Can such a reunion await us?

It is afternoon: I have been in the house, mostly inactive, since morning. It smells of disuse and dust, mothballs and the faint, ever present salt-smell of the sea, and also of the jackal who has been, for a couple months at least, the only visitor. I remember that I had often talked of bringing him here. How life-altering breakups are; every memory becomes altered, because so much of who one is and loves is tied up in another; no stone untouched. But I get up, and put the novel back on the shelf; perhaps I'll reread it again later. A short trip to the kitchen to fetch a botton of cider from the refrigerator, then I take my windbreaker from the stair banister where it hangs, as the waving branches of trees outside indicate a windy day, button it up, and go out.

Wind assaults me as I leave the street and place my feet among the sand and grass of the dunes. The street upon which this beach house stands is a little-used one, the houses all second-homes or rentals, unattended except on holidays or the occasional weekend, so the path through the dunes is overgrown, towered over by tall strands of dune grass, or the short stubby pine trees that grow near the sea. As I walk slowly down the path I tilt my snout up: already the salt-smell is stronger in my nostrils, and the wind feels good in the fur of my head, lifting my tail as well, tugging at the sleeves of my windbreaker. What is it about the ocean that draws lost souls and broken hearts to it? In days of old such wanderers went to sea on ships and never came back; they died at sea, or settled in foreign lands, or returned as different people. But for me there is no such escape, merely the choice: let him go, or wait.

Presently I crest the dunes, and the sea lies before me, choppy and dark. It's high tide, so the white curl of the waves is not far from the dunes, much closer than it was this morning, when I spent five minutes crossing wet sand before my feet splashed amongst the lisp of the waves. Not another soul is upon the beach, just driftwood and seaweed and scatter debris upon the damp sand. The air has the scent of rain upon it, and clouds hang low above the water, hiding the sun. I have, I estimate, an hour, perhaps an hour and a half, before sunset.

But now as I walk upon the damp sand nearest the water, the sun peeks through, and beside me on the sand strolls a shadow, another jackal, dark and serious: another bushy tail, waving in the wind, another pair of tall ears, another long pointy muzzle. How grand that shadow would look, I reflect, were its paws clasped in those of another. Though he and I were very different in height, we did not look so different otherwise; jackals and coyotes are brothers of a kind. We had the same energy, my coyote said. The same lanky, wiry build, the same big ears, the same mischievous grin.

We had many hours of held paws ahead of us, he told me long ago. Do we still?

Long away down the beach I can see the faint outline of a lighthouse, many miles away, shadowy like a mirage upon a desert. He too is like a mirage now, no longer the clear vision of a person and a future I once envisioned, only a question, a possibility, that might at any time grow clearer, or fade entirely from sight. One can wear one's eyes out staring at mirages, or be lead astray by them, but if it is not really a mirage but something real, it can also be the saving of you.

As if jerked from a dream I remember the bottle of cider swinging in my paw, and bring it to my muzzle. Some people find solace in a bottle, but I don't drink if I'm really despondent; it always makes the feeling worse. Today though I'm not despairing: just reflective. The days of tears or despair or at one point, anger, have faded, replaced simply with questioning. And so as the cool tangy liquid flows down my throat I neither fear or welcome any resulting intoxication; if anything it's far from my mind.

A light rain drizzles over me, but the cool sprinkle feels less like a chilling touch than a healing one. Besides me the tide laps at the shore; sandpipers scatter ahead; a tern dips and a flock of ducks swoop in to land amidst the surf. The scent of sea-spray is rich in my nose, and as the wind turns southward, my tail is swept harder against my leg, curling inward. A calming environment, for those who love the sea, and yet, in this quiet, ultra sensual world, a place in which rightly one could surrender entirely to one's senses, experiencing the moment purely through what can be smelt and heard and felt and tasted, a part of my mind is far away, wondering. Wondering as I do during all waking hours. Wondering as I do at night, when in dreams he and I can talk again, as we cannot anymore, as we have not done in a long time.

This is not forever, he had assured me. Someday we will talk again. Sometimes characters in stories I have read said the same things to their lovers, and invariably they did talk again. So by that I have hope. And I cling to other things...we are still Facebook friends, ludicrous though it is, and the other day he posted a photo of his boat, the boat he's been fixing up for years, which long ago he promised to take me out in some day, just the two of us. And I looked at the photo, upon the smooth polished wood and the new paint and the handsome coyote face, muzzle open in a long-fanged grin, and thought: that can still be. He can still take me out in it, out into the river, and across the bar, and out to sea. Who knows: we do not even need to come back. We could just sail on, sail on, sail on....

And yet at the same time he doesn't belong to me; at least not outwardly, even if his heart perhaps does.

You see, yes, I'm the 'other dog,' the jackal innocent or foolish or selfish enough, depending on your perspective, to fall in love with a married man. Unhappily married, yes. And married to a woman, when I know, and he knows, and I think his wife knows, that he is not made for women. It is not a marriage made to last, and yet...he chose her, not me.

It's raining harder now, so I turn back, feeling the wind in my face, raindrops splattering my muzzle, a drumbeat on my windbreaker. What do I care about being wet anyway, as clothes and fur can dry? It's not like a broken heart, forever bleeding.

When he cut me off I was hurt, hurt that he had agreed to his wife's demand that he not see or talk or write to me anymore. Had all our connection meant nothing? And yet when the pain had faded I took his letters from their cigarbox and read again the words that made my heart throb, and knew that the emotions expressed therein were real, genuine, and deeply felt. It was just that something - honour, commitment, fear of confrontation, or some ties I did not understand - had not allowed him to stand up for what he loved.

Or perhaps, I reflect ruefully, I am just a fool who refuses to see when he is beaten, when he has been rejected.

I remember stories of wives whose husbands had died away at sea or at war, who waited for years or decades even, refusing to give up hope, convinced to the end that a day would come when their beloved returned to them. The storyteller likes the lover who waits. Penelope waited twenty years for Odysseus to return to her, faithfully without hesitation, and in the end was rewarded and honoured for her fidelity. There must be honour in such dedication, an unbroken loyalty, even if others might castigate it as foolish.

In the end love makes fools of us all, but perhaps there is a kind of nobility in foolishness.

Alright, I'm back at the house now, with drying fur, a cup of tea beside me, and a fire crackling in the hearth. Getting soaked with rain seems to have snapped me out of that melancholy state, at least. My conclusion is basically this: the lover who waits may be foolish, and may ultimately be disappointed, and may be, in some cases at least, lead on by a paramour who may or may not ever return to them. But in this there is a story: a story that is not present in the lover who easily dismisses or abandons their partner. One might as well try to make of one's life a good story.

In the end I can't really know whether the parenthesis on my romance will ever be closed, whether he'll come back to me, or if we'll never speak again, but I suppose I'd best just keep sending him love, and keep living: continue to make of myself something worth having. Trust that it's meant to be.

And I can keep alive the memory of what we had. What we may have again.

Taking up the cigarbox, I slide into the armchair by the hearth, take out one of his old letters, and begin to read.