i'm thinking of ending things (2020) : a interpretation

 i watched a movie last week that absolutely shattered me in a really good way. not only because it was eerie and beautiful and captured the desolating endlessness of the Midwest, but also because it was in its own way a snapshot of my life.

a woman is on a roadtrip with her boyfriend to visit his parents for the first time. she's in her head--thinking it's time to break this off--and he wants in, half the time already knowing her thoughts. the drive takes forever, and the drifting snow makes it seem like they never move. 

static.

they arrive, and before going inside the house, jake shows her around the farm. all the animals are dead. that's just how it is sometimes, jake says.

"life can be brutal, on a farm."

inside, the house seems empty. there's a door that shouldn't be opened, with scratches in the paint. there's a dog that is and isn't there. there's a picture of a child on the wall who she should know but doesn't.

jake's parents adore her and aren't sure what to do with her. they're both too smart for them, they say. so happy jake found someone as smart as he is to be his life companion.

"i'm thinking of ending things."

she doesn't have a name. sometimes the dining room is empty, like an echo. they want her to stay, but she has to work the next morning. extricating her boyfriend from his parents is impossible. it feels like they've been there for days. have they? before her eyes they age and de-age, cycling between people that she seems to know all too well. the basement is full of her paintings, but they're not painted by her.

the house is a loop, and she has no idea how long she's been sucked in. 

they finally leave, and the trip back to this city is just as long and just as dark. they still aren't going anywhere. in life, on this road, in their relationship.

they stop for ice cream in the middle of the blizzard, and the girl at the window seems to know her and love her.

you don't have to do this, she says. you can walk away.

can she?

they go to his school. she needs to go home. he leaves her in the snow, alone and cold.

the school is a loop. they are a loop. everything's a loop.

we all live. we all die.

"this road seems excessively long."

iain reid, the original author of this world, said that while he has his own idea on the story, he wants the reader to make it their own. the onus of it all is on you.

i'm thinking of ending things, to me, is a blunt message about dying. we all know we can't escape death. anyone who thinks he can is a fool. but the real terror in life is dying. we're trapped with it in four walls, always. it strips parts of us away, piece by piece, until we no longer recognize the world around us or even ourselves. death is a threat. dying is torture. for us, for everyone, for far too long.

when i was fourteen, i lived with a dying woman. time stopped being real at the kitchen table where my parents told me she would be gone in six months. it didn't return until we put her in the ground four years later, just months after i walked across the stage for my high school diploma. my parents had me take a picture with her in my cap and gown. it's a good picture. i always crop her out of it. 

"i said yes because i couldn't say no."

after she was gone, no one in my family knew who they were any more. we built our life around keeping her in it, and four years is a lot longer than six months. you saw it in the little things. like how it took us years to eat at the table again as a family--to have actual meaningful conversations that wouldn't be obfuscated by brain fog or the way she used guilt as a way to get love-- guilt was the only emotion she had full control over at that point. we used to sit in absolute silence, tinnitus ringing out, until it felt like you were the only one left in the room.

i still can't sit in silence without music to drown out the feeling of being alone.

"how can we know ourselves without this solitude?"

the girl is as much a part of jake as he is a part of her--out of love, out of loneliness, out of a great need for companionship--and i think we are all like in that when faced with hardships or the prospect of living life alone. it's a lot easier to look at someone with all my best pieces overcoming the one thing i can't control. it's why i started writing about a girl with brown eyes and grit whose sister beats cancer and still gets the boy even though she's the saddest she's ever been. it's why as a child who never really felt connected to anyone i created a world in my mind where my best friend was a boy who didn't want to live any more but couldn't handle the guilt of dying. 

they are just as much part of me as anything else, but you have to grow up sometime. it always happens. and then you're both gone.

six months after my grandmother died, i woke up one morning with a health condition most doctors laughed at. if i were a couple decades older, they'd diagnose me with hysteria and move on. i would spend the rest of my life in excruciating pain, with my skin burning and feverish bones, until it ultimately killed me, one way or another. i'm practical enough to know that there might not be a clear etiological pattern or genetic abnormalities to account for this disorder, but it's as real as my bones. i wear the stress of being a family that ripped themselves apart, that couldn't say no, just to keep someone--who was hurt so much that her love became pain--alive. i bear it in my skin, in my teeth, in my spine. we all do, in our own little ways, and we will until we die. we're moving on in life, but part of us will always be there. then. static.

i fear nothing more in life than what i will become while dying, and what it will do to those around me.

that's what i'm thinking of ending things (2020) means to me.