I’m sweating, straddling the footboard of my bed, straining to turn a screw that will barely move. If I push all of my weight against it, it will budge an eighth of a turn. I need to break it down, the bed frame that is, into its smaller parts so that it will fit in my truck and then I won’t need to rent a U-Haul for one dumb piece of furniture.

This is why I stopped buying furniture. Because of this, the end. Another ending. Another death and letting go and birth and finding the courage to start over. Another move. I’ve lost count, let’s just call it Number 30. And I fucking hate moving.

I’m groaning and wrestling with my bed on the floor of my bedroom and remembering the day we set it up together. All that hope. It seems like it hasn’t been long enough since that day, to this. Four years in a blink.

The impersonal gods of this weird ephemeral world, the ones that are only here for a laugh, start playing in my head that 90’s rock song that I haven’t thought about in 20 years … ‘every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end’… It’s almost unexpected enough, trite enough, and sad enough to make me laugh.

Those lyrics, whoever sent them into my taking-things-all too-seriously brain, draw me up and I get a breath of clean air, up above my sore wrist, above my grumbling and above my heartache. And I have a better view of the truth of that… how four years have truly gone by in just a blink. How it really doesn’t feel like time has passed at all from that day to this. It feels like just a moment ago. Putting the bed together and taking it apart don’t feel that far away from each other, in either time or quality.

A voice, maybe the voice who shoved Semisonic into my head, says “All moments pass. Everything ends (except that one thing that doesn’t). Maybe that’s why your life has been like this. To acclimate you to what it feels like to let go. To experience the death and birth and death and birth over and over until you really, really get it that it’s always a both/and. You die, but don’t die. Every new beginning,” says the voice, very serious now with just the tiniest glint of a smile, “truly does come from some other beginning’s end.”

I roll my eyes and sigh.

”The trick is”, the voice continues, “to realize so deeply that everything (except that one thing) will end, that it makes you really, really alive for all the in between parts. What if you loved this moment as much as you loved the putting together the bed moment? Love it even with the grief and struggle (both/and), because it is your life and this is an ever-changing, split-second, snapshot reality that is nothing but endings and beginnings forever blending into each other like a flipbook of images and sensations and experiences. What is the moment, that faster than light moment, in between one thing and the next? Pay attention to that bright little empty heart and time stops. Everything becomes a miracle.”

I feel a little better, and stop struggling. Maybe I can enjoy this. Maybe even this, me a sweaty mess on the floor, wrestling with myself, is a miracle. This ending is safe and amicable. Kind and loving and full of the intimacy of shared grief. Maybe I do love this moment, the taking the bed apart moment, just as much as I loved the putting the bed together moment. The beginning that is coupled with this ending is full of promise, full of love, and full of hope. And if I look hard enough, I can see that bright little empty heart of paradox in the center of it all.

So gather up your jackets, move it to the exits
I hope you have found a friend.
Closing time, every new beginning
Comes from some other beginning’s end, yeah.