It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

by Anne de Marcken

I want to know what happens to cups in a world of metaphors. Is it more true that a cup is the body and the soul or that a cup is a cup? I know a cup when I see one, but I am no longer certain about the body and I never knew anything about the soul. So (therefore) maybe I shouldn’t be so sure about cups.

She shrugs. “Some of it is real.”

Dreaming again.

Large. Extra large. White. Brown.

I sing along. It feels amazing.

I know all the words. But they are not right—not the actual words of the song.

I can’t believe what a brilliant ...

You are there.

You are disappointed when you see me.

I sit up in bed.

Emptiness spills into me.

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.

I go into the bathroom, close the door, and tur...

I open my mouth as wide as I can.

As we got closer something seemed wrong with it. About it. Something seemed wrong about it.

That’s what is inside of me.

Hunger is an animal made of nothing.

Nothing is real.

I stand up.

The same no-thing. I can feel it shaping and reshaping itself inside of me.

It was probably not that bad, really, or that good. Something you did when you were a kid. And as you grew up, you knew it wasn’t as bad or as good as you used to think, but maybe, you thought, maybe it was that bad. Maybe it was perfect. So you decided you would keep it in, to protect yourself. One way or another.

We are unbound. We are hungry because we are endless. We are endless because it’s too late. It’s all over. It’s all gone.

Who can say why every loss and deferred sorrow is consolidated in the door’s incontrovertible latch, but for a minute I am undone. Untethered.

I make a sound, a sob or a gasp, and I am that sound. Its echo condenses and settles like a vapor. I can feel it on my skin. The loss.

This is what I do not tell you.

The imperative of hunger.

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

They are sleeping. The living sleep.

On the ground it is night now, but the sky still glows.

I feel it inside me.

The gap between one blink of memory and another. The interval that is relationship.

Not nothing. Not real or unreal. It is not simple emptiness. Not lack. Not want. Not hunger. It is not hunger. It is grief.

I find I have stopped.

The absence of the old, loud world is intense. Silence is a painful pressure.

I say out loud, “It feels real.” I think I am talking to myself.

Or maybe I am always only talking to you.

They are separate and not sequential. Simultaneous but not overlapping. They are periodic and persistent. The syntax is spatial, as if each word is pinned to a different wall of a room that is my body. I can only look at one wall, one word, at a time. Except there are no walls, just the night and my body and the words.

Sometimes I think the world is better now.

I know the living are nearby, but it doesn’t matter.

The grass is cool. I can’t stop laughing. I can’t stop crying.

It is unbearable. Hunger lurches up, furious.

After this, things are neither fast nor slow. Each thing is its own thing, related but not connected to the others.

I cannot tell what it is saying. Now or No or Know or You.

Everything is still.

We are just like the living.

How long before we let ourselves know what we know?

I keep my eyes closed.

Maybe a long time passes or maybe not much. I open my eyes.

She is doughy and not well muscled.

I imagine it was their first time. I imagine it was routine. I see that life has gone on as always.