it always ends the same
I watched Yi Yi for the first time in May of this year. About halfway through the film, the father, NJ, goes out of town on a business trip and meets up with his old high school sweetheart. What at first seems like a happy, romantic reunion, quickly slides back into the same old fights and disagreements between them. Once he goes home to his wife, Min-Min, he tells her he had a chance to relive his past, that he thought he could make things go differently, but that it ended the same.
It always ends the same. I've been repeating that to myself like an affirmation these last few months. It's given me a strange amount of closure in the face of lost relationships I still hold heartache over... my ex-fiancé, my former best friend, and other people I was really close to. It wouldn't have mattered if we have stayed together or friends for any longer, it would've ended the same.
When I think about the people I feel I have closure with, it's people I attempted to reconnect with a second or third time. That second or third time may have started off well enough, but in even less time than before it was already ending. And they always ended the same way they had ended the first time. We had the same disagreements, the same personality clashing, the same belief clashes. Those relationships have always ended for a reason.
What does it matter if it was now or then?