The hardest part, he had discovered in his twenties, was not the experience itself. The hardest part was the translation. When someone asked how long something had taken, or how long ago something happened, or how long until something would happen, he had to convert. The question assumed a unit, minutes, years, a distance along a line, and his interior had no such unit. Everything was equidistant from the center. He answered accurately, because he had built the conversion table over decades, but there was always a half-beat of lag that people who knew him well had learned to not ask about.
His daughter's graduation was in three years. His daughter's first day of school had been twelve years ago. From where he stood now, both were the same radius. This was not nostalgia and it was not anxiety. It was a structural fact about how he stood in time. He experienced the anticipatory love for the graduation and the retrospective love for the first day of school at the same weight, in the same moment, without one diminishing the other. He had no word for this that made sense to anyone who didn't share it. He had stopped trying to find one.
The grief was equidistant too. His father had died seven years ago. His mother had two or three years remaining, by the doctors' estimate. Both of those facts lived at the same radius from where he was sitting. He grieved them simultaneously, the past grief and the coming grief occupying the same space in him, the same quality of presence. He had found this unspeakable in his thirties, when he had tried to explain it to a therapist who kept noting that his grief seemed fresh. It was fresh. It was always fresh. The radius didn't diminish.
Tonight his wife was talking about next summer. His daughter was telling a story from last week at school. They were both equidistant from where he sat. He was listening to both stories with the same attention, the future summer and the past week equally present to him, and he knew he would never be able to explain exactly what that was like. He had been married to his wife for twenty-six years and she still asked sometimes whether he was paying attention. He was. He was paying attention to everything at once, which was different from paying attention to what was happening right now, and he had no way to make that distinction legible from the outside.
He passed the potatoes. He said something about summer. He listened to his daughter's story. The table was warm with light, and last week and next summer were right there with them, as close and as real as the meal.