It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

by Anne de Marcken

I miss sleep. I miss you.

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.

Nothing will ever touch this craving for you. How long before we let ourselves know what we know?

It lasts forever then it is over.

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.

I go west because west is where I remember you.

Like when you are not very deeply asleep and you become less deeply asleep because of a click in your brain and then you are suddenly aware you were more deeply asleep than you knew but also aware that even now you are not yet exactly awake.

I think of all the time I spent deciding. Imagine what I missed. My whole life. I know again that I missed it all with you. Almost all of it. It’s always so bad when I realize this again. But it is also always when I love you most. The sick kick in my stomach and the time-lapse bloom of something like my heart go together now.

I wish that I had turned from the window and looked at you in that moment when you were looking at me.

I think, if I am in the place where we were together, then we are together again.

I feel a stab of fear at the sadness yet to come and I stop crying.

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.