It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

by Anne de Marcken

I take what I can carry. I do not know why I do this except I can’t let go.

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.

I CONTINUE WEST. I KNOW you will not be there in the dunes. Except that I will be there. I will be there and through me you will be there. I think, if I am in the place where we were together, then we are together again.

I used to imagine how it would be after you died. The way my days would go. It wasn’t bad. I would have had so much in having you and would have lost so much in losing you that I would no longer want anything. There would be more time. I pictured myself moving through the quiet house. I saw myself in the garden—my face, my back, my hands changed by not saying anything to anyone day after day. I saw the sheets I would wash and hang out to dry and fold and put away. The short showers I would take. The short hair I would have. I would put on the same clothes every morning and hang them on a hook every night. I was an old woman who looked like an old man. When I would leave the house, I would take my solitariness with me. I would roll down the grocery store aisles neither fast nor slow and put only a few items in my cart, not worrying about the cost of the cheese and sometimes buying eight of the same frozen meal. I would make no chitchat with clerks or retired neighbors. Sometimes I might accept a dinner invitation, and I would bring a gift for the host (sometimes a young couple new to the block, sometimes an old friend who had known me with you), but it would be a relief to everyone when I left without fail at exactly eight-thirty making no excuses. 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.

The sun sets. I watch it go. It sinks very quickly and I’m not ready for it to be gone. Just before it goes, it slows. The last moment is long and sudden. The next moment is vast and loud. The sky and the waves.