Closure... the knock that never comes.

Closure. It's one of those words that sounds like it should solve something.

Firm, clinical, faintly medical - the sort of word a doctor might use, or an estate agent. Somewhere between stitches and stitch-ups...It has the satisfying sound of a door shutting properly, seat belt fastened, an attaché case - closed and clicked.

We reach for it constantly and perhaps a bit unconsciously. "I just need some closure..." "She never got closure..." "It gave me the closure I was looking for..."

We say it in the same way we say Paracetamol - something you take to stop the ache.

And yet, for a concept that we lean on almost too heavily, it is a notion that is both remarkably young, and surprisingly slippery.

The therapeutic sense we nearly all use - closure as emotional resolution, the tidy end to a painful chapter - is barely a hundred years old. It wanders in through Gestalt Psychology in the early twentieth century, where "closure" originally described something quite different and rather cool - the mind's habit of weirdly wanting to complete an incomplete picture.

Show a person a circle with a small gap in it, and their brain will quietly close the gap for them. We are, it turns out, pattern-finishing creatures. We cannot bear a loose end. We see three-quarters of a shape and our mind rushes in to quickly sketch out the rest.

Which is a lovely thing when you're looking at logo ideas, as indeed I was this morning with Vanessa. It is considerably less lovely when the incomplete shape is a relationship, a recent bereavement, or the creeping discomfort of workplace imposter syndrome.

Because that, I think, is the tricksy-ness at the heart of closure. We took a word that described how the eye finishes a drawing, and we applied it to the heart, and then we convinced ourselves that the heart works the same way as the mind. That if we could just find the missing piece - the final conversation, the apology, the explanation, the reason - the shape would complete itself again, like an amputee starfish.

So we wait for it...

And we wait...

We wait for our deeply troubled ex-wife to admit what she really did. We wait for the narcissistic parent to stop lying and manipulating. We wait for the friend to explain the long silence of unreturned correspondence. For the company we serve, to acknowledge the wrongdoing, for the quiet whisper of the deathbed confession.

And here is the quiet cruelty of it: the waiting is the wound. We can persuade ourselves all day long that we are healing - poised and patient, ready to finally move on the moment the missing piece arrives. But the missing piece simply never arrives. The ex-wife isn't sorry. The parent can't see her destructive behaviours. The friend left town, the company folded and the fellow on his deathbed - just died.

And so we stand at the door we've propped open for closure, letting all the cold in, waiting for that little knock, that the universe has no intention of giving.

I lost someone once, years ago now, with a conversation still owing between us. Unfinished business, the sort you always assume you'll get around to, because there's time, there's always more time, until there isn't. He called me the night before he died. I didn't pick up...

"I'll call him tomorrow..."

For a long while I told myself I couldn't move forward until I'd somehow resolved it, as though grief were a sentence with i's to be dotted and t's to be crossed. I waited for a feeling of completion that I had decided, in advance, would come of its own accord. But closure is not something we get - like a headache or a cold - it is something we create.

So of course, it never came. What came instead, much later and by a side door, was something I hadn't thought to want. Not closure, but acceptance. Close, but not the same cigar.

Closure asks the past to change shape. It wants the story rewritten so it finally makes sense. Closure has no agency for the person that needs it. Perhaps in the case I have illuminated, finding closure required the assistance of the other half of the personal equation. And he passed away on the operating table. His name was Robin Green, and he was my besty.

What Closure wants - is for the other person to become, retroactively, someone who would apologise. Closure wants the ends of the ending, sanded smooth. Closure is a demand we quietly make, of a Universe that simply doesn't take requests.

Acceptance, meanwhile, asks nothing of the past whatsoever. It lets the thing stay exactly as jagged and unfinished and unfair as it actually was, and is still prepared to release you anyway. It doesn't need the ex-wife to be sorry. It doesn't need the parent to look at her constant, dysfunctional betrayals. It doesn't require the missing piece, because it has quietly understood the thing we spend years refusing to learn.

Some shapes don't close. And you are allowed to walk away from them, still incomplete.

The circle with the gap in it does not, in the end, need finishing. You are permitted to look at it, gap and all, and simply say: that happened, and it was incomplete, and I am going to go and buy an ice cream, and live my life despite it. No click of the seatbelt or the shutting door. No tidy ends. Just a person deciding they have waited long enough for something in the mail, that was never actually posted.

The Japanese - who seem to have a really cool word for every feeling we in the West are too busy to notice - repair broken pottery with veins of gold. They call it Kintsugi. They don't disguise the break in the vase, or hunt for the missing shard. They are not trying to hide it and hope no-one will notice. They fill the crack with the brightest, shiniest thing on earth, and let the whole fractured history of the object show, precisely because it was broken. The vase isn't restored to what it was. It becomes something else - in my mind, arguably, something better - with the damage worn openly, in the unapologetic glitter of gold.

That, it seems to me, is nearer the truth than closure ever was. We don't get our missing pieces. We don't get the seamless repair job. What we get, if we're lucky and we stop waiting, is the slow gilding of what was cracked. The quiet healing of a wound we didn't choose, into a part of the shape we've now become.

Perhaps closure was never the click of the door after all. Perhaps it was simply the moment you realised you were the only one still standing in the room. And quietly, without apology or explanation, without another thought, you opened the door, stepped out and closed it softly behind you.

On Platform 13, wholeness isn’t found - it’s remembered. Because loss is loss, worthiness is universal, and no one is alone. We are all in this together.