i'll write the ending

"Life is an as-is, no-warranty arrangement, and if you want it to add up to anything, you'd better go at it with fire in your gut." [From Wells Tower's excellent short story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned]

We rearranged my bedroom today, and I can't stop staring at it.

I can't describe what a completely different world this room is right now; I'm falling asleep in a world that's far beyond the looking glass from the one I woke up in. Nothing has been added, nothing taken away; everything that's here has been here, but it's all ordered in a manner that now makes perfect sense.

I want to say something like "wouldn't it be grand if we could do this with our minds?" In reality, though, this physical rearranging is sometimes what gives us the ability to reframe the mental. The greatest tool we're given as human beings is the ability to edit, and it's alarming to know that most of the time we don't realise this at all. We've been provided with life both inside and outside the mind, but if we can't reframe it, then it's just been wasted.

In 2003, I started editing one of my favorite indie music magazines. It was a tiny publication and a massive labor of love. At the same time, I was in the graduate program for philosophy at the New School; each semester, I sat myself down and spent weeks outlining 10-20 page papers on topics like "The Pragmatic Argument For the Possibility of God." By day, I worked at a record label, but at night, my life was an abundance of words in flux. All I did was edit. I worked to pull meaning from poorly written articles on emerging hip-hop artists, and I worked even harder to patch together other people's ideas in ways that made my own arguments make sense.

This is the thing about editing: you can't have words without some kind of context, and it's this context that gives those words their meaning. When you edit, all you have to do is reach inside someone else's head, pull out what you know their heart is trying to tell you about it, and then recontextualize their words in a way that matches. When you do it right, it feels bloody fantastic.

It feels like falling in love, and this is because it's really the same thing. Whether we're cognizant of it or not, the events in our lives turn on our ability to edit: what is love if not that moment when you look at someone and realize that your brain can piece together what their heart is telling you even if they're not saying it?

Editing is one of my secret skills, something I'm fairly certain I'm good at but never have to prove to anyone. It's something I forget I can do until someone asks, and then I get so excited about the reconfiguration of words and bringing meaning into focus that I can't believe I don't do it as a day job. In this same manner, I'm forever hesitant to consider the possibility, but I have a suspicion that I'm good at editing relationships, at looking at people and figuring out what's in their insides and then pulling out the best bits and making sense of who we are together and what we possibly could be.

Sometimes you're wrong, and then you have to get the red pen back out and start crossing out all the stuff that sounded good when you were three whiskeys deep. Sometimes there are pages missing, and you have to wing it for a few sentences of your own before their silence finally makes sense. You'll always wonder what those pages really said, but the truth is that they were ones you were going to have to rewrite anyway.

When we rearranged my furniture this morning, I liberated an old vanity table from its previous incarnation and for no apparent reason made the executive decision that I needed to have two desks. I've spent my evening hopping from one to the other when extra space is required or I get stuck on a sentence; I've worked a bit on Edit #3 of a graduate application for Christiana, written a guest blog for a friend, ordered pants from J. Crew, and checked my email too many times in the hope that I'd be able to fill in a few of someone else's blank pages this evening. I've also avoided doing a few things that I know could be key to my future happiness, and I've considered my own silence in these matters even as I'm writing in possible excuses for other people.

We have a certain romantic idea about the edit: if the words are already there, and we just have to move them around some, how hard can it be? In reality, it's harder than starting from scratch: you can't invent thoughts and actions that you'd like to will into being. Instead, you have to piece together what you can with what you have, and you have to rely on your own interpretation of everyone else's stories until you end up with a cohesive effort that reads in the shining manner you'd originally intended.

It always happens. Sometimes it happens within someone else's crappy hip-hop writing, and sometimes it happens when you're looking for God in the best words of William James, and sometimes it happens when you lose your words entirely just in time to kiss someone back. In any case, you've gotta edit, and if you're gonna edit, you'd better go at it with fire in your gut.