It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

by Anne de Marcken

It is like getting a haircut. The air moving differently around the remaining parts of me.

Which comes first, a believer or a religion?

Carlos says that names are the most commonplace ritual. “Little prayers,” he says, that connect us to each other and to humanity.

In truth the rule had to do with the degree to which I was able to ignore the expression of an individual animal’s will to live, which was directly related to how effectively that animal communicated to me both its individuality and its suffering.

That is what ritual does. It excuses us. Comforts us. Places us in a context so vast and ineffable we can confuse it with truth because it is impersonal and because it has a lineage and because it extends all the way—but only—to the limits of what we can conceive.

Before I can remember or forget our phone number, I dial it.

The hunger is there, but even that doesn’t matter because I am floating on the late summer smell of grass. I am six years old and my father is holding my wrists in his hands and is spinning, spinning, swinging me in a circle. He is the center. My body flies out from him. I am a flag, a ribbon, a blur of light. My hair flies out. My feet fly out. My wrists sting in his grip.

How long before we let ourselves know what we know?

The air is heavy with the smell of lighter fluid. It smells like any summer weekend. It smells like impending disaster.

It lasts forever then it is over.

Or maybe, I say to the crow or to myself, the beginning hasn’t yet begun. Maybe that is where I am running to. Maybe there is a time between end and beginning that is like the time between beginning and end. A time that is to middle as beginning is to end. Maybe this is that time. Middle but without the hope of resolution.

West because west is the direction of leaving behind. West because west is the last resort. I go west because west is where I remember you.

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.

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.

Fasting makes sense of the hunger. The constant internal grasping. The only sensible answer to this is to always withdraw the thing after which I grasp. To subvert. To thwart. To deny. It closes the loop. If I am hungry and I eat and I remain hungry, hunger becomes rage. But to deny fulfillment makes sense of the hunger—I don’t eat, so I am hungry.

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?

It is clear there is no simple beginning or simple ending. Every live thing is the history and future of all dead things. Every dead thing is the future of all live things.

The kind of mystery that is a sacrament.

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.