Anticipatory grief

My chest readies. I no longer know if it’s asthma, or the weather warming, again. I tap my fingers to count the years: the thumb slides back to the index. Five years, almost. Grief measures itself in cycles, and I steady my wishing by feeding the wild, wild spirals. The curl of her hair, rounding the noose. The circle of fireflies in the Minnesotan sky, where I had escaped in June. The way I count time, a winding path to August, and then, a straight line to Boston: 3,110 miles away, away until — April, the fifth since her death. I am waiting, now, in March. The moon is waning, as it always does. The grief, becoming, again.

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Lyanne Wang is a writer based in the Bay Area and a poetry editor at Pithead Chapel.