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The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don’t try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same.
Carlos says that names are the most commonplace ritual. “Little prayers,” he says, that connect us to each other and to humanity.
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.
Maybe Mitchem is right about beauty. He says it persists because it was one of the few real things.
And I think the pain itself is there somewhere. But it is locked up. Locked up in a tiny, invisible, apocalypse-proof kernel. The tiny translucent egg of a subatomic insect laid at the center of each of us. When we’re gone, if we’re ever gone, this is what will remain of us. Fossilized pain.
I miss the way we retold each other the same stories as if we’d just remembered them. And the way we’d play along, asking questions to get at the details we already knew. I think it was so we would still recognize each other even as we changed. Like a snake is the same snake even after shedding its old skin. But now we are just the stories. You. Me. All of us. Just the raspy husk of ourselves. Mitchem says this is another way we’re superior—because we are, at the same time, creator and creation.
I used to smoke a Bic pen waiting for the school bus on cold mornings. Then I pretended my breath was smoke. Now I pretend my breath is breath.
never trust it when someone says “therefore.”
So you decided you would keep it in, to protect yourself. One way or another. You didn’t tell your first girlfriend. You didn’t tell a stranger in an airport bar. You decided, this is the one thing I will die with. I won’t be alone because I will have this.”
It lasts forever then it is over. And I am running.
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.
Maybe, I say to myself or to the crow, maybe that end, the end you can only see after it is too late, maybe that end is what makes a beginning what it is. What else is a beginning but the end of something else?
I go west because west is where I remember you.
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.
But to deny fulfillment makes sense of the hunger—I don’t eat, so I am hungry.
compile a picture of the old woman I will never be. I know everything about her.
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.
I feel as if I am holding on to something, to the edge of something or to the end of something. Everything is going so fast. The light coming very quickly and the dark, too. The planet spinning and me pressed here on its surface. 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
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think of all the time I spent deciding. Imagine what I missed. My whole life.
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 think, if I am in the place where we were together, then we are together again.
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.
“Too late. We learn too late. Too late is how we learn.”
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.