It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

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. I don't look for it on the walls. The thought that I might read it and pass it by, just to go on to the next name is terrible. Like meeting you in another life and failing to recognize you.

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 am in the ocean. I am on the shore. I am trying to remember or to see. The space between me and me is you. This is a mystery.

I close my eyes and try to breathe but the end of the world is in my throat.

The earth holds things in its body. In clay. In ice. The real. The unreal. Time. Each other. All the chances we had.

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.

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.

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

I pretended everything would be okay because it seemed impossible to always be saying goodbye.

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.

It’s gone. That one thing I knew about myself. That thing that made me me, alone in all the universe. I’ve lost it…This is what I want to tell you, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Composed. Decomposed. We are unbound. We are hungry because we are endless. We are endless because it’s too late. It’s all over. It’s all gone.” (Combined quote, pg.27)

The stars are very thick. I understand finally that the sky is not above me, but that I am in the sky. This is related to the crow. And the crow is related to the baby. 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 are just like the living. Hunger is only ravenous hope.

They stand in each other’s arms, already naked and so alive. They glow in the dark like the white flowers, like allegorical statues in a midnight garden. Youth. Love. Stupidity. Lust.

Hunger freed from satiety is grace.

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. I am in the ocean. I am on the shore. I am trying to remember or to see. The space between me and me is you. This is a mystery.

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.

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.

We walk until we’re walking out instead of walking in.

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.

She howls like howling is singing.

But what about the cup?” I say to Marguerite later. I want to know what happens to cups in a world of metaphors. Is it more true that a cup is the body and the soul or that a cup is a cup? I know a cup when I see one, but I am no longer certain about the body and I never knew anything about the soul. So (therefore) maybe I shouldn’t be so sure about cups. Marguerite says, “None of this is real.” I say, “That sounds like something Mitchem would say.” She shrugs. “Some of it is real.

They write names on the walls, in the elevator, on the air exchange unit on the roof, in the dust the dust the dust that covers everything. You can take a name for yourself. You can leave one for someone else.

The sun sets. I watch it go. It sinks very quickly and I’m not ready for it to be gone. Just before it goes, it slows. The last moment is long and sudden. The next moment is vast and loud. The sky and the waves.

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. All the imaginary firsts and the world going on as if it weren't already too late.

Fingía que todo iba a estar bien porque me parecía imposible vivir diciendo siempre adiós. A lo arándanos. Al océano. A los cuervos. A los pelicanos y los correlimos. A los cormoranes. A la luz del sol en la pared de la salita a las cuatro de la tarde. A tus ruidos en la habitación de al lado.