In the Blink of an Eye by Laura J. Oliver

I’m at JT’s for my weekly workout and we’re catching up on what’s transpired in the week since I saw him last. I plop down in the chair next to his desk and draw my feet up to sit cross-legged.

A friend has shown me “before and after” photos of her friend, who had a minor procedure done under a local anesthetic that smoothed out her jawline. I point to my face, then stretch my cheeks back with my palms. “She looked like this! It was amazing!”

He snorts. “That’s ridiculous. Why would anyone do that?” I point to my resting jawline, raise my eyebrows, cock my head.

“I don’t even see those things until you point them out. Stop always pointing them out.”

I look at him sadly. He will never understand. I suggest he add face yoga to his gym offerings just to make him crazy and to delay the start of my workout another minute.

“Face yoga! What’s that?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. It’s a thing. I show him a video. There’s a book, too.”

He rolls his eyes, and I smile at him, mentally casting through last week’s events one more time to see if there’s anything else new in my life to share, although after a year of this, I’ve come to realize these few minutes of story-swapping do not mean I’m special in any way. JT is everyone’s confidant. Confessor.
“Does everyone tell you their secrets?” I ask.

He looks immediately cryptic. “I know some stuff. I hear stuff for sure. Who am I going to tell? I’m a vault. Men are vaults.”

I think about this. Men are vaults, as a rule. But… I once asked him whether my friend Carey, who works out twice as much as I do, lifts more than the 17-pound free weights I struggled to get over my head for the 45th time.

I could never reveal such personal information, JT said, simultaneously shaking his head as he took the weights from me.

We would gossip, but we don’t know any of the same people, except Carey and she’s such an upright citizen there’s not a lot to say. So, I tell him things I’ve learned recently that are actually far more interesting. Isn’t the best kind of sharing pressing a piece of wonder into another’s palm? Passing on something you’ve learned? Something of the gob-smacked variety? I hope so because every time the world stuns me with her beauty, with yet another meticulous miracle, I think of you.

“Did you know that a blink is .25 of a second?” I ask. JT is immediately suspicious. This is a man who pays with cash.

“How do they know? Who measures that?”

“And that in that space of a blink,15,000 new stars will be born, and 300 old stars will explode?”

“No, they won’t. Says who?”

“And 15,000,000 rogue planets will form, drifting through space untethered to a star? Just drifting, lonely, and dark?”
He looks skeptical and grim. JT’s daughter just graduated from high school and leaves the family orbit in a few months. She is on life’s precipice—her horizon is limitless. He shows me her photo from last weekend’s senior prom. She is absolutely stunning in an emerald dress draped like silk.

The stable planetary system that has been JT’s life for the last 18 years is losing a heavenly body; the circular orbit will become elliptical at best, I know. These things happen so gradually. The way the moon is easing away from the earth an inch and a half a year. Then, in one moment, the inevitable will happen. There will be a tipping point—when the earth will be forced to relinquish her embrace.

“And 30 black holes will form in the space of your next blink,” I add as he puts away his phone with his daughter’s photo. Then, to change the topic from black holes, which steal even hope and memory, to something brighter, I say, “But space will expand 527,250 kilometers.”

“Nobody knows that for sure. Come over here,” he says and hands me a resistance band.

Who’s resistant, I’m thinking.

But I’ve been where he is, and I still wrestle with the knowledge that change is the only constant. Not good news, not bad. Just news. Every time someone leaves, there is an adjustment, a reconfiguring of the remaining bodies in the system. Gravitational forces respond in kind to increased distance.

The kids leave home, and you relearn who you are. Grandchildren are born, and you relearn who you are. Friends leave your orbit, and you relearn who you are.

People love and forgive you, and you relearn who you are or become a new star entirely; you burn hot and blue.
A galaxy that can no longer produce stars is called a Quiet Essence. In astronomical terms, it is an epoch, but in life, it is a choice I don’t intend to make. I want to light up my world with new experiences and understanding to the end of time.

To the end of my time.

I step into the resistance band and pull it just above my knees. “People who are lying tend not to blink,” I tell him. “But here’s a fact: over the course of your life, you’ll blink 650 million times.” I blink so he’ll know I’m telling the truth.

After my workout, I leave him looking at his phone again, maybe at the prom photo of his beautiful daughter in the green dress.

He is far from the era of Quiet Essence, but I turn back and look at him through the glass door as I leave. Traffic is heavy on Forrest Drive, and I want to get home in time to call my first-born daughter. The one who lives in Woking, England. The one who travels through this galaxy 3,000 miles and five hours ahead of me with every turn of the earth. The daughter, who, like her brother and sister, I held as close as the moon for a time.

“Don’t blink,” I whisper to myself as I head down the stairs.

It is difficult to see.

Don’t blink.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.