Long back when I watched an episode of ‘Friends,’ I heard Rachel say “And that, my friend, is what they call CLOSURE.” I wasn’t sure then what exactly closure is or if I’d ever feel what it’s like. It took years for me to finally understand what closure is.

For some closure is when they fall in love again, for some it is when the other gets married to someone else, for some it happens just like that over a period of time. But for some closure is when they realize that whatever they felt, whatever they thought was love, was nothing but a huge fantasy. “She” is a representative of this category of lucky ones.

She falls in love and waits on and on for a reciprocation of the feeling under the stupid belief that there definitely is something in his mind. No amount of convincing suffices to make her understand it is nothing but a product of her confused mind. Even when there is a part of her mind telling her to get out of the world of fantasy, she adamantly puts forth her reasons to justify her belief – the vibes she felt, as she calls it.

Worse yet, she strongly believes that the subject of her fantasy is just too embarrassed or egoistic or scared to admit his true feelings. Even when she hears “I never felt anything for you” from the other person, she is reluctant to accept that. She still clings on to a ray of hope that the other will someday realize that all he wanted was to be with her. After a while of that not happening, she starts getting scared, “What if it never happens?” And then she gets into desperate measures to prove that she is perfect without him. It is a battle of conflicting “wants” in her mind, where one half tries to prove there is no feeling and the other half tries to hold on to the feeling out of the fear “What if he comes and confesses his feelings one day and I’m no longer there?”

She believes foolishly that months of cutting herself off from the other and living their separate lives will render her closure – only to find that she is still there, where she started the pursuit of closure. Because all through the time she does this, she hopes fervently that he is dying to talk to her, that he misses her more than she misses him.

Closure is when she gets out of the desperate efforts to get over him and talks to the person, to find out that he never really missed her much, that her absence did not make much of a difference and he is absolutely fine without her in his life. That is the moment when she finally accepts the truth, “He said the truth. He never had anything for me.” That is the moment when she suddenly feels, “Why did I ever think so much about a person to whom I was never special?” That is the moment she realizes with not even the slightest tinge of regret or sense of loss, “Maybe I was never in love. Maybe I was just too adamant to accept that.”

THAT is the moment of closure! 🙂

Also published on Medium.