It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

by Anne de Marcken

The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember.

We are character actors to ourselves—people we recognize but can’t name.

I have a crow inside me and no one can know. I can feel it all the time. It is like the entire night sky and all the stars and every beautiful sound you can imagine.

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

me. The world is big and empty, but inside of me is even bigger, even emptier.

You do not know the end has happened until later.

Every dead thing is the future of all live things.

At some point I find I am getting up without having decided. I wish I could lie back down and cover myself again with the leaves, but it is too late.

There’s no real goodbye. We just turn from each other.

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.