There are many things I know now.
I know that I’ll be 32, settling into my career, into a life still fresh off the ambition of completing my education, and maybe having picked up a new hobby when my first child dies.
I know that it’ll be in the summer, and I’ll hear the news while sitting at my desk before swapping the fluorescent lights of my work building with those from the hospital, before changing them once again for the bright white bulb above my bathroom sink.
It'll only be at the end of the day when I realize how my leather derbys constricted my feet, tight from a day of walking on linoleum, and how the feeling was always there, settled comfortably in an autonomic neural background along with the whistling of my nose I’ve had since I was 11 or my lumbar pain I’ve had since I was 16.
I’ll realize then, and reflect on how I knew it now, that my dead kid will settle in with some mechanical ease into this napsak part of my brain. There is a pocket prepared and ready for it, and at the end of every day after the summer of my 32th, I will open this bag and review how my back glowered when I bent down to tie my tight leather derbys, the ones that keep rubbing my heels, how my nose softly whistled through lunch, and how my child is dead.
Exercise: Narrative Writing, Forethought
