It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

by Anne de Marcken

It is like getting a haircut. The air moving differently around the remaining parts of me.

Sound of the ocean big as the sky.

I miss you.

That was the future. This is now.

It is too heavy.

It is strange to see it like this. My hand. My wrist. The fingernails.

Which comes first, a believer or a religion? Others are showing up now, too.

You can take a name for yourself. You can leave one for someone else.

She lets me go on and on.

Some are funny. Some had more interesting lives. Remember their lives better than others.

Sometimes we get on a topic and just list things. First jobs. Home. Parents. Food.

It was a pragmatic morality. Which is not morality.

Awkward. Tender.

I don’t like to use the word flesh because it sounds too essential or universal.

Comforts us. Places us in a context so vast and ineffable we can confuse it with truth because it is impersonal and because it has a lineage and because it extends all the way—but only—to the limits of what we can conceive.

Wading, really, but all the way in. We can walk right in and under.

Beauty. Dreams. Boredom. Hunger. More than anything, hunger.

I think this has to be related to the abstraction of pain. Physical pain. Emotional pain. The pain of others. My own.

And I think the pain itself is there somewhere.

There will be a pain stratum where all the pain will settle. Pain shale. Pain veins.

Maybe when there are no more living, pain will have real value.

Humanity. That word.

It became an idea. A middle-of-the-night idea. All my ideas now are middle-of-the-night ideas. Perfectly lucid and perfectly flawed.

I’ve already told you this story, but I’ll tell you again.

It is my human shape that allows me to see myself, feel myself, as a human.

I miss the way we retold each other the same stories as if we’d just remembered them.

But now we are just the stories. You. Me. All of us.

It is not precisely accurate to say that nothing has changed. It’s all farther along. And it is quieter. And the quiet is emptier.

It makes me nostalgic for something I never knew. Also, the moon is always full.

I don’t know why it is hard. Like a confession. How do you confess?

I have it now. I wanted it.

It was that p...

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. It is like being too excited to sleep.

Girl.

The possibilities of my current situation had not occurred to me bef...

It’s as if all my life I wanted it there. Or the space for it was there. The possibility. Ideas of things, feelings of things, are becoming the things themselves. When I look up at the moon, I expect it to turn toward me and speak. Every metaphor presents itself as what was there all along.

Now the feeling is the thing.

Perfect.

And of course us.

Consumers are consumers. There is a shift and there is the sound it makes. Shift. The sound of a necessary adjustment, of a thing pushed into place.

We go back to my room. She doesn’t seem surprised and doesn’t ask any questions.

I take out a hoodie and bring it back to my room.

“My options were limited,” I say.

Undifferentiated time is the worst.

The last one I remember was the summer before the last summer.

You cleaned and I cooked.

There was a nearly full moon that night. You said it looked pink and I said orange.

There are no more three-day-long days. That feeling of abundance depended not upon excess and not scarcity, but finitude and a kind of thrift.

The moon is always full. We dream without sleeping. We refuse to return to the earth. Hunger is relentless.

We all look.