It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

by Anne de Marcken

Without you, that indefinite, promiscuous, and expansive pronoun, we are wrecked and we fall. —Judith Butler

Also by turns a sense of newness and lessness—free me, undead me, don’t look at me.

I stay in bed all day. If I lie on my right side, I can keep the arm balanced as if it is still part of me. Or I can pretend it is your arm and that you are in bed with me. I think about how we used to take a blanket into the dunes and wrap up together. Wake with sand in our hair and in the corners of our eyes. Sound of the ocean big as the sky. I miss sleep. I miss you.

That I am depressed because I am indulging in a sense of loss instead of wonder.

“Embrace your new existence,” he says.

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.

“You’ve experienced a significant loss.” He said, “It isn’t just your arm.” He said, “You’re grieving your life.”

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.

“It’s gone. That one thing that only I knew about myself. That thing that made me me, alone in all the universe. I’ve lost it.” He sounds filled with wonder.

Maybe the future of this future looks more like the past.

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?

“I think our hunger is what we have instead of what we’ve lost.”

“I think grief is a time machine.”

“How can we bear more of what is already unbearable.”