It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

by Anne de Marcken

When I was alive, I imagined something redemptive about the end of the world. I thought it would be a kind of purification. Or at least a simplification. Rectification through reduction. I could picture the empty cities, the reclaimed land. That was the future. This is now. The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don’t try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same.

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.

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.