No one will dispute that endings are stubborn. Books end on the last page as if it were the most natural thing, coffees end in their dregs, conversations end in a silence or a see-you-tomorrow. Endings have that insidious way of presenting themselves as inevitable, wielding their tyranny without shame. A book does not end when you close it, but when you forget it on a park bench or forget it in your memory —which is just another kind of abandonment. There is no word more deceitful than “end,” a three-letter lie with ambitions of universal truth.
Memory, then, is the place where endings have the least authority. Memory does not recognize the jurisdiction of the end, because it is itself the territory of the persistent beginning, the place where everything starts over and over, as if Sisyphus had decided that the fun was not the rock nor the summit, but that in-between no one celebrates —the constant act of pushing it upwards. Memories, always fresh, are never fully complete; they are shreds of days, like those half-used packets of instant coffee in the cupboard —a whole collection of incomplete inaugurations.
Beginnings, on their part, disguise themselves better. No one notices exactly when a dream begins; there comes a moment when you are simply inside the dream, and that moment bears nothing of an inauguration —it feels as if you had always been there. The dream is more oneiric than originating, more a state than an event. Freud might say that the threshold between wakefulness and unconsciousness is a space without clear borders, where repression loosens its moorings and desires migrate stealthily toward consciousness. Happiness, too: it’s rare to witness its beginning —you simply find it already installed, and then you wonder whether it began a second ago or had been there for weeks unnoticed. And let’s not even talk about sadness, that silent infiltrator who knows no proper protocol of entrance. The world is filled with things that do not know how to properly begin, ceremoniously, like the first day of school, full of programs and promises.
Between beginning and end lies an unattended space, a zone I propose to call the “in-between,” a noun possible yet barely emerging in the waters of language like a timid hippopotamus. Better yet: the in-betweenment. We are always in-betweening, living in that ambiguous interregnum, and that is where the ouroboros dwells —the snake that devours its own tail. Perhaps you call it an ending; I call it a beginning. We are both right, and we are both wrong, because the truth is we are in-betweening, and the ouroboros is the ultimate in-betweener.
Memory, too, in-betweens. No memory is not a constant beginning-to-end and end-to-begin. Take the case of the last day of school —the most ceremonial of events. When exactly does school end? When the final bell rings? When the principals utter their protocolary words? Or when, years later, you run into a classmate and barely recognize them —and at that moment something ends which you thought had ended long ago? That is the trouble with in-betweenment: it stretches and contracts in memory like an accordion of ideas. We are condemned to be perpetual in-betweeners, Sisyphuses who do not know whether they are coming or going, ascending or descending the mountain.
What I propose is a radical experiment in in-betweenment: for one week, we shall live as if each instant were simultaneously a beginning and an ending. You will put on a new shirt only to throw it away that same day. You will start a book on the last page and finish it on the first. Every morning you will say “it’s over” upon waking, and “let’s begin” before sleeping. I will do the same, but in reverse: I will say “let’s begin” upon waking and “it’s over” before bed. Later, we will compare notes. The fascinating part will be to see if, at any moment, we manage to capture that pure in-between —that perfect instant where we are neither beginning nor ending, but simply in-betweening.
Because life is not a succession of beginnings and endings —it is a permanent in-between that memory shuffles and reshuffles at its whim. Memory is a professional in-betweener; it takes endings and turns them into beginnings, grabs beginnings and slides them toward endings like pushing a coin across a bar table. If you’ll allow me a mathematical heresy, I’d say that life is a fraction where the numerator is beginnings and the denominator endings, but the result is not a number —it is an infinite in-betweenment.
Returning to the experiment: we shall need to design an “in-betweenometer,” a conceptual device for measuring the intensity of in-betweenment in each situation. It could be a notebook where we jot down those moments of pure in-betweening, those instants when life is neither starting nor ending but simply happening in that glorious interval no one celebrates. “Today I was intensely in-betweening while waiting for the bus,” you might write, or “the four-o’clock coffee was a perfect in-betweenment.”
At the end of the experiment —which, of course, will have no end— we shall know whether it is possible to live aware of the in-between, or whether we are doomed to that perpetual oscillation between the illusion of the beginning and the lie of the ending. I suspect we shall discover we are mere in-betweeners in a universe of in-betweenments —insignificant cousins in the great cosmic family of the in-between.
Because, you know what? Even what I am writing now is pure in-betweenment: it began when it had already started in my mind and it will end when you read it —which is precisely when it begins for you. So jot it down in your in-betweenometer: this text, a perfect example of literary in-betweenment, ends right here —exactly where your memory of having read it begins.
