Unfinished Business
“Life’s not perfect. Some loose ends may never get trimmed and tidied.” Hoda Kotb
I was born believing life was a series of loose ends meant to be tied.
Finish one thing. Move on to the next. Keep your hands busy. Keep your head down.
The work of living, I was taught, was completion.
I finished school so I could attend more school.
I got married so I could start a family.
I started a family and produced people with their own loose ends—
cords trailing behind them, reaching instinctively for my hands.
There was always something to secure.
A future to plan.
A problem to smooth.
A worry to hold in place so it wouldn’t unravel in public.
Religion gave this work a name and called it holy.
I was told Jesus was the knot in the rope.
The thing that held everything together.
If I trusted him, if I stayed faithful, if I kept my grip firm, nothing would fall apart.
Even then, there was no rest.
Eternity, I learned, was not relief but assignment.
Endless worship.
Endless obedience.
An afterlife that still required my attention.
The loose ends did not disappear.
They frayed.
They multiplied.
They learned new names.
Faith.
Submission.
Devotion.
The rope grew heavier in my hands.
I became strong in the way exhaustion makes you strong.
Calloused.
Reliable.
Praised for how much weight I could carry without complaint.
I held marriages together that were already splintering.
I held children’s fears, my own fear, the fear I wasn’t allowed to name.
I held silence like a virtue.
I held my breath.
When doubt appeared, I treated it like another loose end to manage.
Prayed harder.
Served longer.
Explained myself smaller.
The rope did not loosen.
It tightened.
Eventually, my hands began to ache in a way prayer did not touch.
My grip weakened—not from rebellion, but fatigue.
I could no longer tell the difference between faith and force.
I had been warned that letting go meant unraveling.
That without the knot, I would come undone.
That my life would fray into meaninglessness.
Instead, my fingers opened.
Nothing collapsed.
What I found were thinner threads.
Unremarkable.
Unblessed.
Not strong enough to bind anyone else.
Breath.
Rest.
The sound of my own voice when no one was listening.
I learned to lean into myself—not as a replacement,
but as a place I had been taught to avoid.
There was no lightning.
No revelation.
No altar call.
There was simply the realization that I was not failing at faith—
I was finishing a job that was never mine.
I was not a knot meant to hold others in place.
I was not responsible for making meaning out of everyone else’s fear.
I was not required to solve the story in order to stay in it.
My work was never to tie the ends.
It was to keep going with my hands free.
Some loose ends remain.
They trail behind me.
Old expectations.
Old grief.
Old love that never resolved into answers.
I let them.
They remind me that life is not a problem to be finished.
It is something that continues—
unfinished, untidy, and still worth living.
I am no longer trying to make a knot out of my life.
https://imhealingoutloud.substack.com/p/unfinished-business
Lorinda Boyer is a Pacific Northwest writer known for clear-eyed, unflinching work about identity, bodies, and becoming. She is the author of Straight Enough and Body, Enough, and her short stories and poetry have appeared in multiple journals and anthologies. She lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest, where rain, grit, and hard truths tend to coexist just fine.
