It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

by Anne de Marcken

Also, the moon is always full.

When I look up at the moon, I expect it to turn toward me and speak.

Emptiness spills into me. My ear is the Panama Canal connecting two oceans of emptiness. The emptiness out there and an emptiness in me. Dark. Entire. Impossible. Emptiness teeming with cold silence. It is so silent it is loud. It is unbearable. It is so familiar.

That’s what is inside of me. Only instead of an octopus, it is hunger. Instead of bees, it is made of nothing. Hunger is an animal made of nothing.

It is not what Mitchem says or what Marguerite says. Not nothing. Not real or unreal. It is not simple emptiness. Not lack. Not want. Not hunger. It is not hunger. It is grief.

How long before we let ourselves know what we know?

I say, “Why is the moon always full?” Marguerite says, “What is it filled with?” “Hunger?” I say. “Grief,” she says.

longer eat.” Marguerite says, “I’m going to leave.” “Where will you go?” I say. “Home,” she says. “Where is home?” “Home is like the moon,” she says. “Filled with grief?” “Never where you expect it.”

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.

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

No vehicle has gone this way in a long time, but there is something left in the pavement, in the engineered curves, the way there is something left in me. It still vibrates with panic. 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.

Then I have the feeling of needing to let go and the feeling of having let go at the same time. This—this—is what it feels like to be undead. And this is what it felt like to be alive.

I think of all the time I spent deciding. Imagine what I missed. My whole life.