It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

by Anne de Marcken

I take what I can carry.

Same darkness. Same moon.

It is quiet. I go to my room.

I turn on the shower.

I stand in the stream for a long time.

I put on a summer dress with blue flowers.

I think of the moon I saw last week. Or yesterday. I say, “Why is the moon always full?”

“Hunger?” I say. “Grief,” she says.

“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.”

I can imagine going further.

Lighter and lighter.

Afterwards I lie with my head in her lap.

I say, “I think our hunger is what we have instead of what we’ve lost.” She says, “None of this is real.” I don’t want her to stop petting my head, so I stay very still and don’t say anything. “Some of it is real,” she says.

I could hear the sky getting lighter in the east.

The stars about to disappear. The moment before you know whether it is the end at last or just another continuation.

It sounds like love.

Not all the same yellow. Three different shades. I can’t quite discern a pattern, but I can’t believe there isn’t one.

She has one towel wrapped around her body and another twisted up around her head. Her skin is moist and glowing.

“Everyone knows this,” I say.

I say, “I had a dream about you.” She says, “None of this is real.”

She concedes. “Some of it is real.”

“And what did you say?” “I don’t remember.”

“Are you me?”

It says nothing even after a long time.

I am not sure if this is a dream.

We are uncertain of how to behave.

An understanding hangs between them.

She seems to consider. I want her to look at me.

She stands and pulls off her shirt over her head, quickly but careful to not mess up her hair. Where breasts had once been, there are two long, sloping cuts. Cuts not scars. Unhealed, unbleeding cuts sutured shut with stitches like the lashes of closed eyes. It flashes through me that the eyes will open and she will look at me from the flat face of her body. I will meet that stare or I will look away. I will drop to my knees. I will cease to exist.

Her hands hanging at the ends of her arms, loosely gripping the air.

Looking at her body is like looking at your face asleep.

I will not see you ...

I put my hand there now.

We all look at her. Her eyes are closed.

“Stop,” she says.

She looks up. “Stop,” she says to the sky. It is low and empty except for the moon.

At last she looks at me. “Stop...

Then there is a sound that is the end of all sound. The first moment of true silence. And that true silence is also the first true darkness.

It even swallows itself. It lasts forever then it is over. And I am running.

I run through the night.

The world is big and empty, but inside of me is even bigger, even emptier. Hunger makes me vast and bottomless. I run and I run and I run.

I sprang forward. It wasn’t effortless, but I could have gone on forever. I had it in me. In my legs. In my feet. In my arms. In my entire body.

Where did this start? What is the beginning of something that is not a story? There is only the place I always return to in my mind.

Not asleep, but not awake in the usual way. Not asleep in the usual way.

Only long enough to have the feeling of waking again and again, but stil...

My ankles are crossed and you are using my thigh as a pillow. I can feel the weight of your head right now.

I can feel that fleeting coldness right now. We hold things in our bodies.

This is the very best moment we will ever share. It is a better end than beginning. 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.

I find I have stopped.

The sky is light in the east. The moon is in the west. It is perfectly round. I am not really thinking anything. I am just looking at the moon. It is silver and flat and serious. A wind comes up to me in the empty morning like someone I’ve met before or seen before but don’t know, and a feeling comes over me. It is sadness. Not a sadness, but sadness. All of it. The whole history of sadness. Everything in me is sad and everything around me is a part of it.