Every ending is arbitrary

[breathedout]

Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pin-prick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn’t come neatly cut into even-sized lengths, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.

—Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride