a fact of now + a fact of then

The alley behind my house is a small river of rain right now but the weather report says despite how much rain there’s been, it’s no more than last summer.

In three weeks and three days, it’s five years. Time fillets and opens into the fact of now and the fact of then—sometime after he died, staring at a small computer screen while a woman told me the first phase of grief, acute grief, was about five years long.

My fingernails gripping the edge of a couch, hard enough to cause pain. The despair at the length of time. The impossibility of making it so far into what was then a sheer and unrelenting rock face of time. So much time.

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