It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

by Anne de Marcken

I miss sleep. I miss you.

The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don’t try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same.

I don’t miss my name and I haven’t bothered to replace it. I miss your name. I’m sorry, but I have forgotten it, too.

The thought that I might read it and pass it by, just go on to the next name, is terrible. Like meeting you in another life and failing to recognize you.

If you were here, you would tell me that you would have fallen in love with me no matter when we met.

“We came here from life. A bleak and aimless world of uncertainty and self-delusion, of violence cloaked in compassion, of greed masquerading as order. A world of ranks and classes and races. Life. A world consumed by fear. A terrible world whose only consolations were the fantasies of god and of science. Life.

Inside bonus rooms with boarded-up windows, the living are plotting their salvation. They are watching reruns. They are playing board games. They are updating the canned goods inventory, the history books, the Bible. They are teaching their children. They are sleeping. The living sleep. They give birth. They die. They sneak out to have sex on a golf course. Even now.

Where did this start? What is the beginning of something that is not a story?

Because we are so small together in the vast expanse, so small together in the lee of the dune, beneath the sky, within the sound of the ocean and the warmth of the sun, we are more together than we have ever been or ever will be again. This is the very best moment we will ever share. It is a better end than beginning.

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.

What else is a beginning but the end of something else?

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.

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

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. It’s always so bad when I realize this again. But it is also always when I love you most.

It is unbearable to look back from the future we did not know we had been traveling toward.

I wish that I had turned from the window and looked at you in that moment when you were looking at me.

I KNOW you will not be there in the dunes. Except that I will be there. I will be there and through me you will be there.

I think, if I am in the place where we were together, then we are together again.

I would have had so much in having you and would have lost so much in losing you that I would no longer want anything.