The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
The cruel thing is not the cliff. The cruel thing is the ledge.
If it were over, the body would know what to do. The body has learned, over the long years, what closure feels like — the specific release of it, the way the breath finally comes back. The body is ready for that. The body has been half-ready for that since the draw was made.
But they gave us numbers instead.
And now the support is doing what the support always does when given numbers: working them. At kitchen tables, on the walk to work, in the blued-out dark of too-early mornings. Running the combinations the way you run a fever — not because it helps, but because stopping feels like surrender.
This is not hope. Hope is warm and general and lets you sleep. This is something else. This is hope that has been handed a spreadsheet. This is hope wearing a hard hat, operating heavy machinery, too loud to hear anything else.
I know what the voices in Boston sound like right now. The careful, responsible ones. The arithmetic laid out in sequence. The scenarios given their proper weight. All of it necessary. None of it kind.
The wound stays open because the mathematics keeps it open. There is no permission to grieve, not yet, not while the numbers breathe.
Miami is still coming. Let the numbers do their work. But know what they cost.