It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

by Anne de Marcken

The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don’t try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same.

Which comes first, a believer or a religion?

Carlos says that names are the most commonplace ritual. “Little prayers,” he says, that connect us to each other and to humanity.

I don’t miss my name and I haven’t bothered to replace it. I miss your name. I’m sorry, but I have forgotten it, too. I don’t look for it on the walls. The thought that I might read it and pass it by, just go on to the next name, is terrible. Like meeting you in another life and failing to recognize you.

I don’t like to use the word flesh because it sounds too essential or universal. Like he and I are part of something bigger—actors in roles originated in dark prehistory and that will be inherited and inhabited by other actors. Neither the actor nor the role quite whole or answerable for any actions. That is what ritual does. It excuses us. Comforts us. Places us in a context so vast and ineffable we can confuse it with truth because it is impersonal and because it has a lineage and because it extends all the way—but only—to the limits of what we can conceive.

Hunger is an animal made of nothing.

Everything is still. I lie still at the center of the hunger that is actually grief,

Mitchem is wrong. We are just like the living. Hunger is only ravenous hope. A mirage. Always receding. The black swarm behind my teeth. There is no bottom to this well. No dark place to wait it out. Nothing will ever touch this craving for you. How long before we let ourselves know what we know?

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.

We hold things in our bodies.

The earth holds things in its body. In clay. In ice. The real. The unreal. Time. Each other. All the chances we had.

The madness of hunger or the madness of grief or just plain madness.

Would I eat a baby? If there were a baby lying in the road, would I eat it? Yes. I would eat a baby. Would I eat you?

The hunger crouches. It sulks. It blames. And I ignore it. Or I do not ignore it. I say, Yes, I know. And still my answer is no. I am parenting my hunger.

I say to the crow, “You can’t be a friend to your hunger.” The crow says, “Robin. Jump. Sweet. Hum.” I know that it is right. “I’m not ready,” I say. “Tooth. Smoke. Switch.”

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.

This—this—is what it feels like to be undead. And this is what it felt like to be alive.

And then at some point it all slows down and there is only choose to move or choose to not move. It is like the hunger. Do I move now? Do I move now? Do I move now?

I hold the crow in my hand. Do I have to let you go? Even you?

I ask you how you would like to die. You have an answer ready. You say, “In my sleep after a good day.”

In the car on the long drive home, I say, “I’m falling asleep.” And you say, “Sleep, baby.”

I wish that I had opened my eyes. I wish that I had turned from the window and looked at you in that moment when you were looking at me. This world slipped by me.

When it is over, it is absolutely over. But it’s hard to believe. I lie back. I wait for it to start again. But it doesn’t.

I look for the hunger, but there is only absence. I feel for the crow and find its empty space. I am at last bereft.

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 w...

This is related to the crow. And the crow is related to the baby. And the crow is related to you. Maybe the way the baby was related to you. Not through blood, but through me. Through a particular shared longing for increase. We wanted more of each other and more life. We were adding on a baby to the house of our love. Like a sunroom, but made of wonder and fear and time and denial.

It was the future. We pictured ourselves living there. All the imaginary firsts and the world going on as if it weren’t already too late. It wasn’t really as if the baby died. It wasn’t even a baby, really. Not yet. I don’t even like to use the word and wish there were a good alternative. It was more like the future died. It became part of the past.

Things that ache. Real things and unreal things. It is pointless to wish I had the hunger back instead of this endless grief.

Is hunger, is rage, the attachment to one’s own form? Is grief surrender?

I am crying even as I think about the crying. I think, this is what remains after the swarm. I think, this is emptiness itself. I think it is more the emptiness of a church than the emptiness of an empty home. Big and high-ceilinged and nothing in it belongs only to me. And when I think this, I feel a stab of fear at the sadness yet to come and I stop crying.

“Maybe we have to go too far,” I say. “Too far,” she says. “Too late. We learn too late. Too late is how we learn.”

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.

I wanted to grieve while I still had the solace of you.

The end of the world happens so quietly. Things as large as glaciers are so quiet.

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.

am in the ocean. I am on the shore. I am trying to remember or to see. The space between me and me is you. This is a mystery.