It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

by Anne de Marcken

We’re stories telling stories, nothing. —Fernando Pessoa

When I was alive, I imagined something redemptive about the end of the world. I thought it would be a kind of purification. Or at least a simplification. Rectification through reduction. I could picture the empty cities, the reclaimed land. That was the future. This is now. The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don’t try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same.

They write names on the walls, in the elevator, on the air exchange unit on the roof, in the dust the dust the dust that covers everything. You can take a name for yourself. You can leave one for someone else.

“Hunger freed from satiety is grace.”

We all look at the cup. I never trust it when someone says “therefore.”

“But what about the cup?” I say to Marguerite later. I want to know what happens to cups in a world of metaphors. Is it more true that a cup is the body and the soul or that a cup is a cup? I know a cup when I see one, but I am no longer certain about the body and I never knew anything about the soul. So (therefore) maybe I shouldn’t be so sure about cups. Marguerite says, “None of this is real.” I say, “That sounds like something Mitchem would say.” She shrugs. “Some of it is real.”

That’s what is inside of me. Only instead of an octopus, it is hunger. Instead of bees, it is made of nothing. Hunger is an animal made of nothing.

Inside bonus rooms with boarded-up windows, the living are plotting their salvation. They are watching reruns. They are playing board games. They are updating the canned goods inventory, the history books, the Bible. They are teaching their children. They are sleeping. The living sleep. They give birth. They die. They sneak out to have sex on a golf course. Even now.

She howls like howling is singing.

It was the end. But we did not know it then. You do not know the end has happened until later. Or you do not admit it. Looking back, you can see it. And you realize that all the time after that was just an effort to keep going as if it weren’t already over.

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.

Everything moves in the same way. One bird. One thousand. The ocean. The moon. The sky comes all the way down to the water. I am somewhere below.

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.