It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

by Anne de Marcken

We have to reach deep in and bend down the highest branches to get the berries. Sometimes they slip loose from our fingers and drop to the ground. It feels like a waste. It feels like a tithe. It feels like how this place will be without us.

I pretended everything would be okay because it seemed impossible to always be saying goodbye. To blueberries. To the ocean. To ravens. To pelicans and plovers. To the cormorants. To the sunlight on the living room wall at four o’clock. To the sound of you in the next room.

Which am I—the abandoned nest or the tree that holds it?

No sign that we were ever here. No here where we ever were.

When you have arrived at the thing itself, then all you can do is compare it to something else you don’t understand.