When you stop to analyse it, the shock, you realise, is not in the event, but in the way it is revealed; the discovery that what has always seemed rock-solid is not. Like misjudging the depth of the ice atop the lake and plunging unprepared into freezing depths, or witnessing the magic eye picture retreat into the dots as you try to refocus, as if mind over matter could will it back, and yet the longer you look, the more inevitable the disappearance – for much as you try to pretend otherwise, this is how the universe has to work.
Because you it is impossible to predict when the image will fade, you tiptoe around it, trying not to look too hard, knowing that the earthquake that will shake your foundations will be comprised of a million tiny little shocks; twisting, turning, wreaking their individual havoc until the eventual whole is greater than the sum of the parts ever was, and the impeccably neat twin beds that have arrived since the last time you set foot in this place serve as your stark reminder that mathematical probability is never wrong.
At first, you wonder why they never mentioned it, and in return, they tiptoe too.
“She wakes in the night, you see,” he grumbles. “All the time. Sleep apnoea, they say it is. And then that wakes me, and then I can’t sleep for watching her, waiting for her to breathe again…”
“It’s his restless legs,” she says reluctantly, when questioned. “They drive me mad, dear. Wake me in the night, you see. And then that wakes him, and then I can’t sleep for his fussing… “
Tailing off, each blaming the other, or perhaps considering the other, or perhaps beginning the separation, and you wonder if it’s wrong to think of stepping away before the seismic shift swallows you whole.
