It was a school project and it was due tomorrow.
It had to be a two-hundred-word essay about endings. He hadn’t even started it. He twiddled the pen around in his fingers while staring at a blank sheet of paper. He figured that endings could be noisy, like a car crash or a gas explosion in a block of flats. It could be very quiet, like and ice cube melting or a person taking their final breath in a bed during the night. They could be spectacular to look at, like the final multi-coloured rocket at the end of a firework display or as unimpressive as an electric kettle clicking off when the water has boiled. He figured it could even be the ending of a smell, like the stink of cabbage being cooked when a kitchen window is opened to let fresh air blow through.
On the other hand, there were personal endings, like leaving a company to work somewhere else, or watching a film in a cinema that was scheduled to close and be demolished the following day. It could be the end of living in a house, knowing you would be moving to another the next day, or watching the final episode of a TV series, or picking up the pieces of an irreparable vase that fell off of a shelf, or taking a last ride in a car that is about to be replaced by something better, or digging a hole in the garden to bury a dead hamster, or your final day of school, or the last day of the year, or waving goodbye to someone that you knew you would never see again.
He supposed even his essay should have an ending. He could talk about the fact that some endings were happy and some sad and how some were both.
His problem was, he didn’t know where to begin.