No Happy Endings
“I have decided to terminate the lease... While this is not the solution I wanted to opt for initially, your actions have left me no choice.”
– The Roommate
“Tell me we won’t be strangers.”
– The Ex.
“Oh wow. This is really hard,” he says tonelessly.
I wait.
“This is your one month notice, we’re letting you go.”
– The Finance Guy at Work
In the writing room of my life, I imagine the scriptwriters are day-drunk and going through something. If I was there, I would tell them to tone it down because nobody goes through so many unexpected endings in such a short period of time. No TV audience would buy it, but this is the true story of how I lost my apartment, my partner, and my job all in one week.
As a writer, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out where a story is supposed to start and where it should end. I grew up loving certain kinds of stories: Disney movies where the villain is conquered and the lovers kiss, 90s/2000s romantic comedies featuring two people who obviously belong together, and young adult novels with romantic subplots that carry the protagonists through dystopian or fantastical landscapes. I am a sucker for a happy ending, but real life is not the same as fiction.
The happy endings in stories are actually happy beginnings: the beginning of a relationship, a marriage, or a new kind of world. A happy ending requires a vast expanse of potential, so the audience can imagine the deserving protagonists frolicking through fields of joy after the screen goes dark. After watching your favorite romantic comedy, it would be a little disappointing if the screen flashed a message: P.S. they break up two months later. Although that would be much closer to what life is like.
Fiction makes you feel like you have to build your real life into a happy ending. For many people that looks like a successful partnership, friends, financial security, and job satisfaction. We must achieve these and maintain them. We celebrate anniversaries as testaments to the idea that we have found our happy endings, but why do we place such value on permanence?
What happens when the happy ending ends?
When I graduated from university, I landed a job that would allow me to be financially independent; I found an apartment in the middle of the city where I would live with two of my best friends. The icing on the cake was that my boyfriend lived a ten minute walk away. It was a great ending to the undergraduate chapter of my life.
Then the new chapter began – almost immediately hurtling toward a series of endings I didn’t expect.
Ending one: two bunnies and a Cinderella story
Apartment hunting with your best friends as a recent graduate feels like receiving a gold star on top of your primary school quiz. You did everything right: you graduated, got a job, and found two people who liked you enough to live with you.
At our Zoom graduation, my soon-to-be roommates and I toasted to our new lives. We talked about cooking together, watching our favorite shows after work, hosting parties, and maybe even adopting a pet. My parents agreed to help furnish our apartment, and we worked together to get everything else we would need. The apartment was perfect. It was centrally located, but on a quiet street, and the building was new so we got a good deal on the rent. I remember taking pictures of each other signing the contract, opening the front door for the first time, and standing together in our empty living room. This was the beginning of a whole new life, and we would be doing it together.
Five months later we met up for drinks on a sun soaked evening in an Abu Dhabi gin bar. We sipped nervously – a little unsure of what to say to each other. One roommate had been spending all of her time at her boyfriend’s apartment for the last month, and myself and the other roommate had decided to ask her to come home more often. If not for us, then to help take care of the bunnies we had adopted together. The confrontation was gentle, and seemed to go well. Until the confronted roommate stormed off. When we returned home, she was on her hands and knees, furiously scrubbing the bunny cage.
“I guess you just want me to be the bunny cleaner.”
I lost my temper and told her she wasn’t “fucking Cinderella.”
A fight ensued. One week later, she told us she was moving out. I was shocked, but after how terribly our confrontation about the bunnies had gone, I was starting to wonder whether our relationship had run its course. Then she told us she wanted to sublet her room – mainly so she could pay rent to her boyfriend. She seemed to think it was her right to do this. We disagreed.
It would have been a different story if she had needed to move, or if subletting was legal or even a common practice in Abu Dhabi, but we weren’t prepared to sacrifice our comfort for six months because of something she simply felt like doing. We said no and explained how uncomfortable we were with the idea and how upset we were that things had escalated this way. She said if we wouldn’t let her sublet, then she wouldn’t move out.
Sometime later, she went to the landlord and cut the housing contract behind our backs. She only told us after ensuring we had given her our parts of the rent up until the new move out date. Not only did she leave us in the lurch financially by refusing to pay for our municipality fees and pets, what was more upsetting was that she clearly saw us as her enemies. The cost of the cancellation fees she paid was equal to what she would have paid for her share of the rent. There was nothing for her to gain except the knowledge that she had punished us.
I wish there was a different ending to our five year friendship: it wasn’t one that any of us deserved. If we were going to have such a bad ending, couldn’t it have been more adult than a fight over taking care of pets? If I had to insult someone to the point of ruining our friendship, couldn’t I have called her something more badass than just “Cinderella”? I never thought a close friend could think so little of me that she would expect me to agree to whatever she wanted, and would try to punish me by kicking me out of my home, simply because I said no.
In a movie, our happy ending would have been the day we got the bunnies. We were enamored with them, and with our own audacity to make decisions for ourselves. There was nobody to tell us what to do and nobody to warn us of the risks of living with friends or expecting responsibility from each other.
Losing a friendship can sometimes be more devastating than losing a romantic partner. While we can accept that most romantic relationships end, we expect our friendships to carry on and carry us through our losses. In my case, the loss of this friendship came as a gradual realization that she didn’t respect or care about me. I can’t imagine a world where we would still be friends, which makes it easier to let her go. I learned from this ending – and the next – that losing a genuine love is more difficult to recover from.
On the same night she texted me the news about cutting our contract, I asked my boyfriend to come over. I felt shaken and had a question for him. It was one I had been putting off asking.
“How do I factor into your future plans?”
Ending two: now I can’t drink mango juice
A conversation that felt like tumbling headfirst down a hill. The whole time I kept thinking, this can’t be happening. I tripped on something tiny; how am I still falling?
When we finally landed, the only thing that was clear was that he didn’t want to be with me anymore. Our two year relationship was over. We tried to go for a walk, he bought me mango juice, and we spent the rest of the night together. We told each other what we loved about each other and what we hoped the other person would have in the future. We cracked jokes about being exes now. We cried. It was the most brutal ending I have ever experienced.
Since then I’ve been haunted by the last adventure we had – a camping trip to the desert. His car got stuck on a sandy road. We dug it out under a sky full of milky stars and realized we weren’t going to make it to our initial destination; we refused to go home. Instead, we drove another two hours to a different campground, crawled under a fence in the dark, scaled down a dune, lit a fire, pitched a tent, and talked late into the night.
I think the happy ending of our relationship would’ve been driving back home that morning. I can still see his hands on the steering wheel in the sun. I played a song I knew he loved and he turned it up, smiling. In the romantic comedy version of our relationship, we would remain on the road while the credits rolled. The audience would never find out that two months later he wouldn’t be happy with living in our story anymore, that after a night full of goodbyes he’d walk out through my front door, and another story would start.
Ending three: are you kidding?
This breakup was the first time I’ve ever fulfilled the “can’t sleep, can’t eat” cliché. I couldn’t fall asleep unless I was exhausted, and then I would only sleep for four or five hours before waking up. Every type of food seemed disgusting to me, and when I did eat, it made me feel nauseous. I was working from home to avoid seeing him at the office. The pile of clothes on my floor grew into a small mountain.
Exactly one week after I got dumped I was laid off due to company restructuring. The first thing I said was, “Are you kidding?”
After that, my situation started to seem funny. Someone asked how I was doing and I said at least getting fired was distracting me from the breakup. When I told my mom the news we both laughed. In a way, losing my job felt like a good thing because there was nothing tying me to my previous life anymore. I had already lost so much, and these endings would trigger other endings too: my other roommate and I couldn’t live together anymore, we didn’t know what would happen to the bunnies, and I wasn’t even sure whether I was living in the right city. I felt like I had been pushed from a plane without a parachute.
It's easy to look back and see when things were not working. But in the moment, you can feel desperate to hold on to what is familiar. When I left Canada for the UAE, I cried for days and cursed my parents for taking me away from my friends, who turned out not to be the right people for me. I can look back on other relationships and see that they ended when they needed to. In the moment though, endings feel like a disaster.
There is a poem by Elizabeth Bishop that sneaks into prominence at times in my life when I’m experiencing an ending. Every time I read it, different parts scream out to me. At a coffee shop in Paris I read it and thought about losing cities and continents. On a soccer field in my hometown I thought about losing houses and heirlooms. This time I am thinking about the poet’s notion of things that are “filled with the intent” to end.
One Art
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
We are taught to hold onto things. To create permanence in our lives at all costs because we think if something ends, it is a failure. I’ve seen how damaging it can be to cling to a life you no longer fit into. Last year my parents’ marriage finally ended and it felt like a long exhale. I learned from them that an ending can be both painful and necessary.
Bishop’s poem begins with losing her keys and expands into losing plans, memories, the cities she knows, and the worlds she lives in. It ends with love as her biggest loss, and having just been through so many successive endings, I know that to be true. Love is also the only thing that helps. The day I lost my relationship, my mom brought me to her apartment and put me in her bed. For three weeks afterwards she called me every day, listened to me sob, and took me out for daily walks to clear my head. My roommate watched TV with me every evening to distract me. My long-distance friends set up calls and messaged me even while they were at work or in class. My friends in Abu Dhabi took me out and reminded me of who I am.
On Valentine’s Day, one friend gave me a list of books that helped her through a breakup. We were sitting on a patio beside a closed pool and convinced each other to do something I would normally fantasize about but never do. We kicked off our shoes, jumped into the pool holding hands, and laughed like teenagers while we were being chased off the property by two baffled security guards.
“Why did you do that?”
“We wanted to swim.”
“You need to leave.”
“We’re going!”
Endings can make you feel alone, but I have never experienced more love than when I was experiencing loss. I am amazed that we are resilient enough to continue loving each other even though we all have histories of hurt. I couldn’t be friends with my ex-roommate now, but I don’t regret the love we showed each other while we were friends. The relationship still meant something even though it’s over.
The night we broke up, my ex asked if I would still send him my novel when I’d finished writing it.
“I’m writing a love story. I don’t know how I’ll finish it now,” I said.
“This is still a love story,” he replied.
Maybe that night, so full of sadness, was our happy ending. Maybe our relationship was filled with the intent to be lost from the beginning – just like everything is. Humans tell stories as a way of making meaning out of our lives, and especially our losses. We try to simplify relationships and experiences into lessons we can use for building our happy endings. Sometimes that means we erase complexity, and even pretend the people we loved were never important to us, or that we were fools for loving them. But life doesn’t fit so neatly into fiction, and it’s dangerous to try to force it to.
The irony is that in writing this story, that’s exactly what I have done. It’s comforting to make a fiction out of your life; fiction is one way of understanding and cataloguing the things that have happened to you. I write for the same reason everyone does: because I hope I’m not alone, and so the people I’ve lost know something about my experience of loving them. But mine is not the only version of this story, which means it cannot be fully true. Even I will see it differently someday.
Losing my friend, my apartment, my relationship and my job wasn’t hard to master. They tumbled through my fingers the same way I have lost homes, family units, belongings, countries, plans, and identities. These endings were not a failure, or even a lesson, they just happened. No matter how much I want my losses to make sense and to be building toward some great happiness, the best they can offer me is a beginning.