Handbook Section 7.3: The Perfect Continuous Tense
The past perfect continuous tense describes ongoing actions that happened in the past instead of a one-time occurrence. Ex:
● The week before I found out he cheated, I had been planning a surprise vacation for us to New York City, a place he always said I’d hate.
● He had been saying to our friends that I wasn’t spontaneous, that I followed every rule, that if it wasn’t on my calendar, it didn’t happen. I had been getting another bottle of wine from the kitchen when he said it, and I stopped long enough to take a breath and smile before walking into the room.
The present perfect continuous tense shows an ongoing action in the present that was started in the past. Ex:
● I have been sitting in my car for twenty minutes, not wanting to go inside. The house looks like it's holding its breath, like it’s been waiting all night for someone to come through the front door and throw their keys on the table and yell, "Honey, I’m home!”.
● My mom has been texting me all day, checking that I’m okay. I have been ignoring all texts, from her, from my sister, from our friends, from the hotel in New York.
The future perfect continuous tense depicts future ongoing actions that continue up until a certain, concrete end point. Ex:
● He will have been missing me so much after a week, I tell myself, that he will come back, will apologize for not loving me enough the first time.
● And after a year, I will have been saving for that studio apartment in New York long enough to put down a deposit, long enough that I will not have been thinking of the way he once told me I was perfect, that I would always be perfect, and how I had thought he had meant for him.
Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has recently appeared in Variant Lit, Flash Frog, Fictive Dream, Ghost Parachute, and Wigleaf, and she won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. You can read her work at https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema).
