It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

by Anne de Marcken

It is total. I am taken, or taken down. I dr...

And then the feeling passes. Leaves me. I look for it. In the moon. In me. Nothing but a n...

Slow curve and slope. This is how it feels to surrender.

I go west because west is where I remember you.

Later, a nice desk.

Everything I encounter has the quality of having been encountered before. An always already feeling. And at the same time, everything I encounter is strange to me. Have I been here with you? Did we come this way? What is familiar because I have seen it before and what is just part of a familiar story? What is remembered and what is received?

Kitchen tables. Kitchen chairs.

A bathroom scale.

Shoes pulled from feet, I think.

The houses are all nearly identical.

And the trees are different in this town. Here they have a loved look.

Whole families together. Even the family pets.

I look at their framed photographs. At their keepsakes.

I tilt my head a little to read the spines of their books. I sit down at their kitchen tables.

I look out of their windows.

The line of a river to the south is a greener, thicker ribbon of willow and alder.

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.

The only sensible answer to this is to always withdraw the thing after which I grasp.

It closes the loop.

But to deny fulfillment makes sense of the hunger—I don’t e...

The hunger crouches. ...

And I ignore it. Or I do not ignore it. I say, Yes, I know. And s...

I know that it is right. “I’m not ready,” I say.

During the day, the wind blows. I walk into it and walk into it. I think if I open my mouth I will fill like a windsock. It drops again when dark comes.

I remember singing and reverence.

Toppled by its own weight, it lies in great whorls and waves. Swallows reel and tilt. Grasshoppers stridulate. Yes, stridulate. You would say, how do you know these things? I would shrug and say, how does someone know anything?

Or someone who is obligated to keep you—a caretaker. I go in.

A glass on the bedside table.

Only the ordinary nothing.

I lie down on the bed. I sit at the kitchen table.

I compile a picture of the old woman I will never be. I know everything about her.

I can see it is futile.

There are two old trees. An apple and a plum. They reach to each other, are collapsing slowly into one another’s arms. Branches as thick as trunks themselves. The plum is a mess of tender red-leaved watersprouts shooting up from old and new breaks. It is heavy with reddening fruit.

It is clear there is no simple beginning or simple ending.

I look up through the branches to the sky. Small suns dapple my body.

The summer of peach paper and green ink. I feel something else is possible.

This has all been known for so long.

I am lying on the ground between the two trees. I lie in the same position without moving.

At first I only hear the birds and when they are not there I think it is quiet. But after a while—a long while, I think—I notice that I am having an idea instead of hearing. And when I notice the idea, I instantly stop having it. Like when you are not very deeply asleep and you become less deeply asleep because of a click in your brain and then you are suddenly aware you were more deeply asleep than you knew but also aware that even now you are not yet exactly awake.

Once I stop having the idea, I realize it is not quiet at all. Sometimes it is very loud. The leaves are loudest.

Always sighing. Not a tired sigh or a wistful sigh. Not resigned, but almost. If resignation could be resolute. I feel as if I am holding on to something, to the edge of something or to the end of something. Everything is going so fast. The light coming very quickly an...

It takes all my willpower to not let go and at some point I decide it doesn’t matter so I do let go. But I was not actually holding on to anything so the feeling does not go away. Then I have the feeling of needing to let go and the feeling of having let go at the same time.

And this is what it felt like to be alive. And then at some point it all slows down and there is only choose to move or choose to not move. It is like the hunger. Do I move now? Do I move now? Do I move now?

I was already awake, but then I was more awake. I did not move right away.

I had fallen

asleep with my cl...

I felt great regret. The regret of having to get up to close the window was just the loose end of all the other regret in my entire life. I sat up on the edge of the bed. I crossed the room. I closed the window.

Do I move now? Do I move now?

The snow was deep and fresh and still coming down. There was no color. The trees that were near looked black. The trees that were far away looked like the breast feathers of an etched bird. The sky was white.

I lay in the snow, in the impression of my own body.