It’s been three years. The third anniversary. Before, when I heard someone say “you don’t know unless you went through it,” I didn’t believe them. Now I do.

I never wanted that experience.

Somewhere, in some alternate reality, we still have our house. We still have the Christmas tree and my father’s tuxedo and the furniture that my grandfather had as a child. We still have the money we saved towards our ambitious goals (funny, when you have no home, your priorities change). I still have my job, and I’m happily/ignorantly unaware of how insurance settlements and payouts work, and the myriad patchwork agencies and organizations that exist to help, in their own particular way.

In this reality I have a lower tolerance for hardship, I’m less cynical (er, probably), I may or may not weigh the same. I still rely on natural gas to heat my home although I promise myself that we’ll switch to a heat pump when the furnace finally becomes irreparable, something which I manage to delay for a great many years due to my technical aptitude.

We may or may not have a 2nd son, he may have a different name. We wrestle with the insignificant problem of converting the guest room into his room and now where will guests stay? Oh wait, that’s right, we finished the basement. We complain of the shape of the staircase and vow to replace the stupid carpeted floors with something cleaner and more durable. We wrap a decorative holiday garland around the awkward post next to the stairs because we plan to take it out someday but just haven’t gotten around to it yet. We expend too much energy discussing paint color and how much is enough.

Sometimes at night I lie in bed and think if I had a superpower, it would be the ability to go back in my own timeline and branch off to experience an alternate reality from that point forward, and be able to jump to any point on any timeline I had created thus far. This all seems a complicated way of saying I wonder how things would have been if…

But then I remember that this is where I am and who I am and what I am.

And how I am.

“You still have your health.”

“Thank goodness no one was hurt.”

“It’s just stuff.”

But you don’t know.

And I hope you never have to.