“The Cost of an Ending” is about a writer who is hopelessly in love. He lives with a strange and unbearable ability. He can write the future of his own love story. Whatever he puts on the page eventually becomes real. He can imagine tenderness, closeness, moments of joy and intimacy. He can write different paths, different versions of events, different choices. Yet across every reality he creates, there is one state of time that never changes. No matter what he writes, no matter how long he delays, he always ends up losing her. That loss is the ending of his love story. It is fixed. It cannot be erased. It can only be postponed.
Knowing this, the writer reaches a point where writing itself becomes unbearable. He understands that to finish the story honestly would mean accepting the one outcome he cannot live with. Caught inside this dilemma, he begins to speak to his own conscience. This conversation is not dramatic or confrontational. It is quiet and inevitable. The conscience does not comfort him or offer alternatives. It simply reminds him of the truth. That no matter what he does, the ending will not change. That the loss is unavoidable. That the story must end where it always ends. That he has to put it there.
The conscience tells him something simple and devastating. If you do not end the story, he stays hopeful forever. As long as the final line is not written, the ending does not arrive. Time remains suspended. Hope survives, even if it leads nowhere. The writer understands this completely. He realises that he is faced with a choice not between happiness and sadness, but between certainty and possibility.
He knows that if he writes the ending, he will lose her forever. The loss will become real and irreversible. But if he refuses to write it, the ending will never happen. He will remain in a state of waiting, trapped in a hopeless reality with no possibility of a future, yet still holding on to the presence of love. He chooses this state consciously. Not because it promises happiness, but because it allows love to exist without being taken away.
And so, the writer makes his decision. He does not change the ending. He does not rewrite it. He simply denies its existence. He closes the book before the final line can be written. In doing so, he accepts a life of waiting over a life of loss. He accepts uncertainty over finality. He accepts hope, even if it never resolves into anything more.
His final words are not a resolution, but a refusal.
Then let him wait.
That is where the film ends.
Written & Directed by Aaditya Bajpai
Aaditya Bajpai 