It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

by Anne de Marcken

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.

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.

Everything in me is sad and everything around me is a part of it.

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.

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.

I lie down in the bower created by the plum and the apple. I look up through the branches to the sky. Small suns dapple my body. I feel the way I did the summer I moved into a tent in my mother’s backyard and read all the Narnia books. The summer of the portable typewriter. The summer of peach paper and green ink. I feel something else is possible.

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 and the dark, too. The planet spinning and me pressed here on its surface. Every moment is the moment I know I am not going to be able to hang on. About to slide off over and over. It takes all my willpower to not let go and at some point I decide it doesn’t matter so I do let go.

The bed was still made and you were not there. I had fallen asleep with my clothes on. My arms and legs felt syrupy and useless. I heard the rain coming across the cut grass and then on the porch roof and I knew if I did not get up and close the window it would pool on the windowsill and wick up into the curtains, which already were stained with the tea brown tidelines of previous storms. 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 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. The sick kick in my stomach and the time-lapse bloom of something like my heart go together now.

I discover I don’t have to decide to move or to not move. I can lie here for a hundred years. Five hundred. The squirrels sit in the branches and eat the plums, dropping the red skins and pits onto me. The apples fall heavily and make a vinegar smell. All the leaves fall. I am covered in leaves. The rain falls.

The apple tree and plum tree are bare as the old women we will not be together.

Things in rows and ranks are mournful. Trees planted to pulp. Soldiers or their gravestones. Multiplicity and order reveal sameness and variation. The limitations of our individuality. That we can be felled.

I sit down in the road to wait out the rest of the night. 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. It attenuates and disperses the small noises made by things moving in the untended fields to the south of the road and the plantation to the north.

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.

This is not the day we fall asleep in the dunes. This is the day there are ravens. Their heads are big as draft horses. They play some game we don’t understand but like to watch. It is the day we almost don’t notice thousands of birds migrating south, their endless, fearless flight, the perilous dotted line they thread down into the troughs and along the breaking crests.

I wish that I had opened my eyes. I wish that I had turned from the window and looked at you in that moment when you were looking at me. This world slipped by me.

I pretended everything would be okay because it seemed impossible to always be saying goodbye. To blueberries. To the ocean. To ravens. To pelicans and plovers. To the cormorants. To the sunlight on the living room wall at four o’clock. To the sound of you in the next room.

What is unbearable is already too much. How can there be more?

And the crow is related to you. Maybe the way the baby was related to you. Not through blood, but through me. Through a particular shared longing for increase. We wanted more of each other and more life. We were adding on a baby to the house of our love. Like a sunroom, but made of wonder and fear and time and denial. It was the future. We pictured ourselves living there.

The sky is low and charged with snow that has not yet begun to fall. A flock of starlings keeps lifting off and landing, lifting off and landing. The sound of their wings all at once is soft and explosive. A hundred feathered concussions.

If they were to burn me, would I find myself back in the plantation with the baseball team? If they cut me into little parts and bury me in separate holes, will that be that? Will I still think of you? Will my loss be multiplied or divided?

How small or altered or distant must a part of us be before it stops being a part of us? Does it ever? Is my cremated arm still sending me signals even now?

I wonder what direction I am facing, if beyond those hills is the ocean, the dunes, the memory of you.

“What’s at the ocean?” What is at the ocean. What is at the ocean. “I think there just has to be somewhere I’m going,” I say.

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.

I realize now that when I was playing these silent movies of life after our life, you were still there. You were sitting with me, the two of us alone in the theater, still together. This sadness is not an empty church and not an empty house. It is the whole empty world and I am in it and it is in me.

I wanted to grieve while I still had the solace of you.

The end of the world happens so quietly. Things as large as glaciers are so quiet.

When you have arrived at the thing itself, then all you can do is compare it to something else you don’t understand. A rock. A crow. The only things that remain themselves are the ones you can never reach.

The things that are too big or too far away or move too slowly to detect. Smooth. Feathered. Loved. Already lost. They will always be only what they really are, and you will never know what name to call out to them.