Top Shelves Are Easy, It’s Conclusions I Can’t Reach

The title says it all. I’m 5’3 and determined: top shelves are easy. I’ve lived with tall roommates before, and they laugh like nobody’s business (well, really, it isn’t – but I digress) to see me stretch and jump and growl and climb on the counter. But I make it, every single time. I get what I’m reaching for. I’m proud of it, too. Top shelves are easy. 

Conclusions, now. If I could get the 6’-and-over crowd’s help, I would…swallow my pride and do so. In a roundabout way. Or maybe even a fairly direct way. Sometimes one’s pride must be sacrificed. If I could reliably summon forth a top-notch conclusion by ritual pride-sacrifice – listen, this place would look like an over-enthusiastic artist’s rendering of any Incan temple you care to discover. Sadly, conclusions do not seem to respond to summoning (ritual or otherwise). 

Instead, conclusions are like hard-of-hearing beagles. They happily romp around in the distance. They somehow always get further away the more you run after them. To all appearances, they are oblivious to your pursuit. This is why I have a betta fish instead of a beagle. This is also why I have a hard time reaching conclusions. 

And if I’m being honest, it’s not even that I have a hard time reaching conclusions. I wish the problem were that easy. Rather, it goes something like this: I have a hard time reaching conclusions because I have a hard time telling stories. 

This is because I don’t like stories. They are never true. Or rather, they are not true enough. They edit out so much; it’s an act of necessity, because you can’t show everything, and if you could no one would understand it. 

But I feel it is ethically questionable to decide that one portion of the story deserves to stay just because it will make a streamlined plot, a comfortable fit in a human-sized neural network. There are probably more interesting stories out there, for example, considered through an insect’s eyes. Just imagine the kaleidoscope plot lines twirling elegantly as mutually-contradictory events unfurl on opposite sides of your dragonfly eyes. 

It’s a crowded concept; it’s a riotous idea. It would not be fun to edit. It may (certainly would) be impossible to write. But it would save me from having to prioritize events, decide what should stay, and – Heaven forbid, we’re back here again – reach a conclusion about the whole messy business. 

You know, life doesn’t conclude. Of course it does, after a fashion – but then you discover it doesn’t. Hearts are mended almost as soon as they are broken, and broken many times before they are ever even made. Single-celled organisms thrive in the wonderland of cellular apocalypse. Neurons lose their spark and heartbeat stills…

And even after all that – I STILL CAN’T REACH A CONCLUSION –

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