Instants
Life can change in an instant. No one grasped that better than Lydia and Saul on New Year’s Eve.
The year had been filled with concussive waves of deliciousness. One moment of karmic perfection after another had them dabbling in their dream realms. There was that undercurrent of disbelief, true, of breath holding against the other shoe dropping, but they respected it. When it came though — because it always does, doesn’t it? — it was the briefest of moments, the tiniest of actions, the most inconsequential of thoughts. An instant that changed everything.
“I’m so glad we stayed in,” Lydia smiled at her husband of over a decade across the counter.
“You and me both,” Saul’s reply was laced with that genuine love reserved for so few. His fingers worked at opening the bottle of wine, their third of the evening. But the midnight hour was close at hand, and consumption in the safety of one’s home was vastly more appealing to the maturing pair than the public revelries of the season.
The witty banter had ricocheted between the pair throughout the evening as they had revisited the fortunes of the passing year. Navigating the holidays had been the typical family juggle, never quite appeasing everyone else as much as those minds would have liked. The conversation dipped toward the in-laws along this vein of thought, and Saul swung his forearms up, one at a time, deflecting the incoming questions on the make believe bracelets he wore on his wrists. Wonder Woman would have been proud.
Without missing a beat, Lydia lifted both hands in front of her, raising the fictional shields which were often summoned forth to absorb the worst of in-law attacks. The deflected discussion returned back toward Saul with humorous aplomb, and with one hand, he mimed volleyball spiking the conversation into the earth. With the other hand he mimed slapping off the light switch on the wall next to Lydia some seven feet distant to silence the line of thought all together.
The switch flipped. The darkness of the New Year swallowed the synchronous gasps, and born from the shadow of that instant, nothing was ever the same.