It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

by Anne de Marcken

Zombies used to be drug addicts, television watchers, videogame players. Now zombies are zombies. Consumers are consumers.

“Building a time machine.” “I think grief is a time machine.”

What else is a beginning but the end of something else?

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.

At first it is a relief to have stopped deciding, and then it’s not. It is not a relief and it is not hard. To not decide. To not move. I thought it was hard, but then I realize it isn’t actually.

We learn too late. Too late is how we learn.”

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.

When you have arrived at the thing itself, then all you can do is compare it to something else you don’t understand. A rock. A crow. The only things that remain themselves are the ones you can never reach. The things that are too big or too far away or move too slowly to detect. Smooth. Feathered. Loved. Already lost. They will always be only what they really are, and you will never know what name to call out to them.