The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
I know this state. I have been in this room before, and so have you.
It is the room where you start doing sums. Where someone's phone comes out and you gather round it like it is giving warmth. Where the numbers circulate the group chat not as information but as ritual — not because anyone believes the ritual works, but because the alternative is standing still in the feeling with nothing to hold.
This is what I want to say about the permutations: they are grief's homework. The working-out. You do them not to find comfort but to find the edges of the thing, to press against each wall of the scenario until the room has a shape. The shape does not get smaller when you find it. But at least it has a shape.
Hope and dread have separated before. There was a time — not long ago, further back maybe — when they occupied different days. Hope was Tuesday. Dread was later. Now they arrive together and claim the same Tuesday, and we have learned to hold both because the alternative is holding neither.
What gathers before Miami is not anxiety. It is fluency. We have learned the language of needing and depending and almost, and we are fluent now, and fluency is not the same as ease.
The destiny is technically ours.
I feel that word technically like a stone in a shoe. It is there on every step. We walk anyway.