It’s taken me over a week to get to this point. You might attribute that to a desire for the never ending pasta pass to never end. Actually it’s just I’ve been busy and tired. Like all of you.

Here are some of the final moments of our yearlong foray into carbohydrate depravity. Final curtain call for our team of pasta fans.

Goodbye to this purple friend. The first one didn’t work right, but the restaurant was always nice about charging meals off anyway until I got corporate to send another one.

Goodbye to these salads. They’re honestly quite solid if you just want some greens and all that nonsense. I do love their dressing, but it’s pretty heavy duty. And the peppers are my favorite. Just nice to have never-ending salads to offset some of the heavy stuff.

Last meal was meatballs. Tradition trumps health. I love meatballs, despite the whole waking-up-at-3am-with-dry-mouth thing from the unholy amount of sodium in these bad boys (and, let’s be real, in EVERY SINGLE DISH at this establishment). Like, I get that things have to be shipped in frozen and all that, or sit on a shelf for a while until somebody like me comes through to eat it. But the levels of salt in all the food here are simply unreal, and that’s one thing I am absolutely not going to miss about this year.

Goodbye to all that. So many stories we found at these tables. It was a refuge from the reality of healthy meal-planning, cooking, and clean-up. It was the kind of conspicuous assumption that makes you both proud and ashamed to have been born in this great American land.

One last SECRET MENU ITEM for those of you keeping track. This is the saddest and least necessary one of them all! See, if you order meatballs on your pasta, and you just take some of the breadsticks and just shove that pork and beef sphere straight on in there, you got yourself a MEATBALL SUB. Just like grandma used to make them back in nowhere, never. Honestly, this is actually probably my best secret menu item, because this is something I would actually eat. I don’t know what that says about me at this point.

Last meals aren’t supposed to be cheery, but this one wasn’t so bad. I think about T. S. Eliot, here at the end. I think about him most of the time, but also here at the end of something. I think about that line, too–Ernest Hemingway, his story, “The End of Something,” even without the story it’s such a wonderful little captured line that I drop into so many situations, that comes up all the time. Just being able to sit there and label some piece of life, “The End of Something.” But I was going to say, before Robert Frost broke in, with all his matter-of-fact about Hemingway–I was going to say that I think of the first line in Eliot’s poem, “East Coker” a lot, and the last line. He begins it with:

In my beginning is my end.

and finishes with:

In my end is my beginning.

…and I like that because it means that time is a circle and things will always come around again and we’ll know what to do better next time. From the start we see the finish line, and from the ending, we know where we began, and we’ve come up upon it again. We start again, over and over, and end the same way all over again, somehow, but we know it when we see it this time around, we know we’ve come once again, to “the end of something.”

I like that realization because it’s not even profound, it’s just there, and it’s just true.

Eliot finishes those Four Quartets with this:

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate…

And he leaves us at the end in the beginning of the grandest mystery of them all: that we might go around this circle again and again and again and maybe one day we’ll know why:

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

And so, at the end of something just as noble and just as ridiculous as most of the things we make our lives out of, I bid thee, goodbye, friend, until we circle back around once again.

Item 1: whole-grain linguine, meat sauce, meatballs

Breadsticks: 2

Final weight: 169

Weight change: +3 pounds

(What does that say about my other eating habits?)