beginning, middle, end.

Beginnings are easy. Endings are, in some ways, even easier. But the middle? It's the hardest part.

Middles are murky, untidy, full of bluffs and blind alleys. Nobody can say, in the middle of something, what or when the End will be--it just is. The End might sideline you, it might knock the wind out of you, or it might be a gentle passing into nothing--but it's certain. But the Middle of Something? Impossible to say, how long it'll last, how far it's got to go, how much more you've got to endure.

After the fine, heady rush of a Beginning, with its newness and shiny glamour--the Middle comes as a bit of a nasty shock. It's the unexpected wrinkle in a clean linen tunic, the missed stitch in the knitting noticed three rows too late, the running-out-things-to-say on a first date, and the oh-fuck-I-just-said-too-much-and-too-loud of an argument in the calming lull after the first thunder of anger and passion, it's the bland, boring and scarily undefinable center of a Twinkie.

The Middle: it drags on. It doesn't know what to make of itself--is it the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end? The Middle questions its every choice, its every move. It squints into the future, blinded by sunspots of brilliant dreams yet tangled in the kudzu of fate. It is a lazy day dream, distracted by what might have been and what will be.

The Middle second and triple and quadruple guesses itself. It fucks up, makes the wrong the decisions. It fucks up some more. Sometimes, it rights itself--more often, it stays off-balance, like some pathetic leaning tower of Pisa. It is caught in the cat's cradle between hope and despair.

I am good at beginnings--those require only a bit of arrogance and the mad assumption whatever I'm doing might be The Right Thing, at long last. And I am very, very good at endings: a needle full of dull numbness and the thing--whatever it is or was--is done.

But the Middle... ah, the Middle. It confounds, it buffets, it lulls, and then it dares belligerently to take it--to take you--to the edge of the end and throw it--and you-- off the cliff.

And I absolutely suck at it.