It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

by Anne de Marcken

It is clear there is no simple beginning or simple ending. Every live thing is the history and future of all dead things. Every dead thing is the future of all live things.

Every moment is the moment I know I am not going to be able to hang on. About to slide off over and over. It takes all my willpower to not let go and at some point I decide it doesn’t matter so I do let go. But I was not actually holding on to anything so the feeling does not go away. Then I have the feeling of needing to let go and the feeling of having let go at the same time. This—this—is what it feels like to be undead. And this is what it felt like to be alive.

I think of all the time I spent deciding. Imagine what I missed. My whole life. I know again that I missed it all with you. Almost all of it. It’s always so bad when I realize this again. But it is also always when I love you most. The sick kick in my stomach and the time-lapse bloom of something like my heart go together now.

It is unbearable to look back from the future we did not know we had been traveling toward. That is not right. It is unbearable because we did know. It was plain as our own palms.

We go you-then-me through the beach pines and out into the dune grass. Whatever sound our footsteps make is swallowed up by surf we can’t see until the last rise when all the shining world comes into view and we are like two piles of leaves picked up by the wind. Everything that was separated into you and me is thrown together and tossed up into the sky.

I realize now that when I was playing these silent movies of life after our life, you were still there. You were sitting with me, the two of us alone in the theater, still together. This sadness is not an empty church and not an empty house. It is the whole empty world and I am in it and it is in me.

When you have arrived at the thing itself, then all you can do is compare it to something else you don’t understand. A rock. A crow. The only things that remain themselves are the ones you can never reach. The things that are too big or too far away or move too slowly to detect. Smooth. Feathered. Loved. Already lost. They will always be only what they really are, and you will never know what name to call out to them.