Thirty

I kept repeating to myself over and over and over: "Thirty years...thirty. Thirty years." I can instantly be transported to the moment I heard about his death. Sitting in the passenger seat of Kathleen's mom's Chevy Cavalier at the stop light on Hartford Road with a Marlboro Red dangling from my fingertips as the radio DJ made the announcement. I was seventeen and it was a complete shock. I'm sure grown-ups weren't surprised by the news. That they saw the writing on the wall, but I didn't. Thirty years. Thirty. It's just so difficult to get a grasp on. So I look at the pictures of him on the walls of my home and hope that somewhere in this universe he is still a piece of stardust, floating in the ether; not gone, merely changed, altered.