The narrator in Written on the Body tries very hard, but does not always succeed in embodying a queer, abstract, script-less relationship. Throughout the novel we see references to the cliché’s of love and marriage. The narrator mocks this idea of love as prescribed with a set path that can be followed to a happy and blissful end. However, the narrator is not always successful in letting go, or changing the patterns of past relationships. However, the very last line suggests to me that the narrator has finally found a way out of cliché’s at last and into queer time. “I don’t know if this is a happy ending but here we are let loose in open fields” (190). This line implies queer relationships and queer time. If we see the narrators desire through the book for the ‘forever’ relationship as the future that heteronormative time dangles in front of us than this line becomes a shift into queer time. X says “here we are” implying the now, the present-ness, the simply ‘being’ that queer time emphasizes. “The constantly diminishing future creates a new emphasis on the here, the present, the now” (2) says Judith Halberstam about queer time. The words “loose” and “open” also reference a queer time. A place without the structure and deadlines of heteronormativity is the field that the narrator is released into.
However I find the most redemption for the narrator comes from “I don’t know if this is a happy ending”. That is the essential difference between a prescribed heteronormative relationship, and a queer undefined relationship. When we have your two story house in the suburbs with your happy-hetero family and yappy dog, you know it’s your happy ending. The whole point is that when you get to ‘perfect life’ you recognize it; you can look back on all your hard work and say that you made it. However, the narrator does not describe that moment of clarity, of feeling like X got everything X wanted. Instead the narrator lives in the unknown, in the potential of happy ending. In the books last line it denies the reader the ‘and then they lived happily ever after’ and in doing so queers the books. This is not a love story. Nothing about it functions as expected, even the ‘happy ending’.