It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

For me there are two alternatives: either swallow or break free.

Ideas of things, feelings of things, are becoming the things themselves.

It was more like the future died.

. It is pointless to wish I had the hunger back instead of this endless grief.

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.

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 ask you how you would like to die. You have an answer ready. You say, ‘In my sleep after a good day.’

When we’re gone, if we’re ever gone, this is what will remain of us. Fossilised pain.

We’re stories telling stories, nothing.

I don’t like to use the word flesh because it sounds too essential or universal. Like he and I are part of something bigger – actors in roles originated in dark prehistory and that will be inherited and inhabited by other actors. Neither the actor nor the role quite whole or answerable for any actions. 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.