504/GWT
Selected passages decorated with thought spirals.
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DOC 234—34/2
REX-13: 978-0882681/283
Quotes from
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over
by Anne De Marcken
Annotations by O.Xu
2025.10.14
Mitchem says I’m dead. That I am depressed because I am indulging in a sense of loss instead of wonder. “Embrace your new existence,” he says. I picture myself trying to do this with one arm.(p.4)
Embracing change. Depression can’t hit a moving target. move. move. move.
Rest in peace to one of the best that has ever made music.
He put all the answers in the records.
Embracing this new existence with wonder. I will continue to learn so much from him and from everyone who carried the torch before him.
Mitchem says it is important to do small, ordinary tasks when you’re depressed. That even if I don’t do anything else all day, I should make the bed. This morning he came in and opened the curtains. He stood over me, that half-moon head of his backlit by the window. He picked up the arm from where it was lying on the floor and held it out like something I needed to account for. He said, “It isn’t just your arm.: He said, “You’re grieving your life.” (p. 4)
I feel like a baby learning to walk again. I feel the clouds of depression starting to part.
I tell myself to do three things a day. Any three small tasks to keep me moving. Batch cook some fried rice. Cut and freeze 6 bundles of green onions. Comb through and archive my favorite pictures in 2017, 2018, 2019, etc. Set up a new piece of furniture for my kittens. Touch the piano. Open and dust the cobwebs from my music vault.
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 go on to the next name, is terrible. Like meeting you in another life and failing to recognize you.
My first name was inspired by Raven Symone’s character in the Bill Cosby (yikes) show. She was outspoken and unfiltered, just like I used to be as a kid. I was quiet for a long time after put into a strict Chinese school. I have only recently regained my voice again. My Chinese still isn’t very good.
My last name means “slowly.” I am a slow reader, a slow learner, a slow writer. Me writing one essay is me revising one essay 20 times. I feel self-conscious about how slow I am. I feel intense pressure at the thought of people waiting on me. I ran track and field and was ass. I was soo behind everyone else in one race. I was afraid that I was wasting everyone’s time, but the crowd cheered loudly and enthusiatically as I crossed the finish line. In that moment, I felt better about taking up time.
I love this video of D’Angelo taking his time.
My Chinese first names mean “peaceful” and “happy,” which I thought of as a description for the docile child my mom wanted me to be. Upon reflection, I would like to be peaceful and happy. So simple.
Perhaps the chief difference between me now and me then is my tolerance for terror. I think this has to be related to the abstraction of pain. Physical pain. Emotional pain. The pain of others. My own. The flinch is there still. And I think the pain itself is there somewhere. But it is locked up. Locked up in a tiny, invisible, apocalypse-proof kernel. The tiny translucent egg of a subatomic insect laid at the center of each of us. When we’re gone, if we’re ever gone, this is what will remain of us. Fossilized pain. Not carbon. there will be a pain stratum where all pain will settle. Pain shale. Pain veins. Quartzy ligatures made of tears, sighs, sobs, moans, terrible screams. Maybe when there are no more living, pain will have real value. Pain inflation will drive a pain market. There will be pain panners like gold panners, shaking out the suffering. We will build a giant pain collider to crack open its secret structure and release the tiny, lace-winged gasp of our lost humanity. Humanity. That word.
- Maybe we kill the living to get at their pain. Or our own. (p. 10)
To be alive is to experience pain and discomfort.
But then it wasn’t just a joke to myself. It became an idea. A middle-of-the-night idea. All my ideas now are middle-of-the-night- ideas. Perfectly lucid and perfectly flawed. I am having a very long sleepless night. Exactly the opposite of the endless sleep that is death.(p.11)
it’s 2:57AM 10.15. I am experiencing the opposite of the endless sleep that is death. I keep telling myself I will fix my sleep schedule. I will.
The phrase “perfectly lucid and perfectly flawed” clicked something in my brain. I think that’s how I want to communicate with other people. be as clear as I can and accept that there will always be some meaning lost in translation.
It’s 4:02 AM now. Yet, I point out when my friends stay up late. The older sister in me can be overbearing. It’s past the middle-of-the-night. The early risers will wake up soon.
2025.10.22
... Undifferentiated time is the worst. There are no more three-day-long days.
I tell Marguerite about three-day long days. The last one I remember was the summer before the last summer. We were having a dinner party and I had to get up early to mow the lawn before the bees were on the clover, and had to fix one of the wooden folding chairs so we’d have enough for everyone. You cleaned and I cooked. And after everyone had left, even though it was so late, we watched an episode of “Madame Secretary” in which the Dalai Lama’s death (pancreatic cancer) threatened to derail a climate accord between the US, Cheina, and India... Afterward, you kept me company outside while I had a cigarette. There was a nearly full moon that night. You said it looked pink and I said orange. You went up to bed and I washed a pan that had been forgotten outside by the grill. By the time I carried the cat up with me, you had turned out your light but had left mine on and had filled my water glass. I worked on a crossword puzzle until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.
There are no more three-day long days. That feeling of abundance depended not upon ecess and not scarcity, but finitude and a kind of thrift. It had to do with there being only so much time in the day but still more than just enough and using up every ounce of it, not wasting a moment. But to be undead is to be superfluous, perpetual. The moon is always full. We dream without sleeping. We refuse to return to the earth. Hunger is relentless.
Three-day long days. I love the end of a full day when I read in bed until my eyes get heavy.
I tell Marguerite about three-day long days. The last one I remember was the summer before the last summer. We were having a dinner party and I had to get up early to mow the lawn before the bees were on the clover, and had to fix one of the wooden folding chairs so we’d have enough for everyone. You cleaned and I cooked. And after everyone had left, even though it was so late, we watched an episode of “Madame Secretary” in which the Dalai Lama’s death (pancreatic cancer) threatened to derail a climate accord between the US, Cheina, and India... Afterward, you kept me company outside while I had a cigarette. There was a nearly full moon that night. You said it looked pink and I said orange. You went up to bed and I washed a pan that had been forgotten outside by the grill. By the time I carried the cat up with me, you had turned out your light but had left mine on and had filled my water glass. I worked on a crossword puzzle until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.
There are no more three-day long days. That feeling of abundance depended not upon ecess and not scarcity, but finitude and a kind of thrift. It had to do with there being only so much time in the day but still more than just enough and using up every ounce of it, not wasting a moment. But to be undead is to be superfluous, perpetual. The moon is always full. We dream without sleeping. We refuse to return to the earth. Hunger is relentless.
Three-day long days. I love the end of a full day when I read in bed until my eyes get heavy.
2025.11.22
“A hotel might once have been a metaphor for the body, for purgatory, for any trasitory site. Muffled hallways. The repeating pattern of low-pile carpet. Muffled hallways. The repeating pattern of low-pile carpet. Sconce lighting. Echoing emergency stairwells that smell vaguely familiar. The sound of doors closing. Plastic ice buckets. Theft-proof hangers without hooks. Drawers no one ever uses. Perfect. And now here we actually are, non of us sure when we checked in or whether this is really our luggage.
“And of course us. Zombies used to be drug addicts, television watchers, videogame players. Now zombies are zombies. Consumers are consumers.”