The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
There is a particular tenderness in being told not to worry before the thing you haven't thought to worry about has fully formed. The reassurance arrives first, and then the mind has to go looking for what it was supposed to be reassured about. It finds it. It always finds it.
Somebody drew a map to the fear and called it a plan.
I understand why it was said. The impulse is generous — here is a thing we have considered, here is a thing we have prepared for, you can rest. And for a certain kind of person, you can rest. But the support is not entirely that kind of person. Some of us receive news of a coping strategy the way we receive a sign on a trail marking a steep drop ahead. The sign is not the drop. The sign does not prevent the drop. The sign simply makes sure you are thinking about the drop the whole way down.
Miami in late June holds heat like a grievance. The sky there does not clear — it decides. And now the decision has a shape in our heads, a named hollow where the weather will either arrive or not arrive, and either way we will be standing there waiting to find out which.
The strategy was filed. The anxiety has been given an address.
What comes next belongs to the air above the stadium. We will meet it there.