It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

by Anne de Marcken

I closed m...

I think of all the time I spent deciding. Imagine what I missed. My whole life. I know again that I missed it all with you. Almost all of it.

But it is also always when I love you most.

The same sound. No difference between ocean and wind and you.

I discover I don’t have to decide to move or to not move.

All the leaves fall. I am covered in leaves. The rain falls. At first it is a relief to have stopped deciding, and then it’s not. It is not a relief and it is not hard. To not decide. To not move. I thought it was hard, but then I realize it isn’t actually. 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.

The apple tree and plum tree are bare as the old women we will not be together. They hold each other. It is winter now. I continue west.

Things in rows and ranks are mournful.

Multiplicity and order reveal sameness and variation. The limitations of our individuality. That we can be felled.

Every time, it was only after we had already resigned ourselves to the heartbreak that we realized it was just that we hadn’t gone far enough.

I lie back and look at the moon and stars until they are smudged out by a fog that condenses close to the ground. It is cold

and prickles my cold skin.

I think about it. “Maybe,” I say.

I think, This is a poem. I fold the book closed in my lap, marking my place with my finger, and imagine a chapter that isn’t there, about how they became lighter and lighter and lighter.

It is the most perfect description ever written. In the dream, I close my eyes and repeat the words to myself again and again, telling myself not to forget.

It is gone by the time I hear the sound of footsteps approaching from the west. The sun is up somewhere, the fog is thick and the world is blank.

A figure emerges from the fog.

“Okay,” I say.

Some go ahead of us and some fall in behind.

But the trees say sshhh and I say nothing. Their trunks are straight and branchless for twenty feet or more.

We walk into the trees for a very long time. Longer, I think, than is possible without reaching the limits of the rows. We keep going when it gets dark and are still walking when it is light again. The sameness makes it seem we are not making any progress at all. The trees just repeating and repeating. I feel confident but no longer care that something is different about how time and space are operating here. We walk and walk and the fog never fully lifts, though sometimes it thins and I can see deeper into the woods. Every step, every slight change in position, reveals a new pattern of tree trunks and pathways radiating outward.

I don’t answer.

A nod. A wave.

“Steady!”

“They were here.”

“You used to be more forthcoming,” I say.

“I’m supposed to go in?” I say.

I shrug back. I open the door, step in, and close it behind me.

More like the edge of the universe. Utter and confounding.

It is a relief. It’s less a choice than a recognition or an admission.

Do I have to let you go? Even you? It doesn’t say anything.

I become aware that I feel heavy.

I sit down next to it. That is good, but lying down would be better. I stretch out on the ground.

We are picking blueberries.

Like the sound of fingertips tapping on each other. We lapse in and out of silence. The rest of the day is far away. Mourning doves call to each other from some other place. Blackberry vines muscle their way in. Deer have slept here.

I look up at the sky.

I can hear you clearly but it is also as if you are far away. It is unbearable to look back from the future we did not know we had been traveling toward. That is not right. It is unbearable because we did know. It was plain as our own palms.

It feels like a tithe. It feels like how this place will be without us.

Our fingers are blueberry stained.

Everything that was separated into you and me is thrown together and tossed up into the sky.

From far away the wet sand looks just like the sky but up close it is like brown feathers or scales.

Smooth and flat for worrying.

This world slipped by me.

It will turn me inside out.

When it is over, it is absolutely over. But it’s hard to believe. I lie back. I wait for it to start again. But it doesn’t. After a while I can hear again. The specific noises of quiet. I look for the hunger, but there is only absence.