Volta

 
Everyone can point to the decisive moment, the incident that changed it all, the acid-in-the-face consequences. She says:  if I had not married him, but waited for Johnny to come back from the war. He says:  if I had not screwed that conniving bitch but gone home when Mary begged me. If I had arrived an hour earlier, an hour later. An endless queue of hollow-eyed “if’s.” Everyone knows the moment that turned into the great divide; a ditch, a trench, a chasm between past happiness and present pain, between bliss and my ulcer, between blue skies and your bottom dollar. Everyone has a turning point to review at owl-light, a regret that pummels them in the wolf-hours of self-examination. Oh, the horror of waking dry-mouthed from the nightmare, to sit up and find a greater horror—the one from which there is no awakening. Again he kills the man in a blind rage. Again she takes her eyes off the child at the edge of the water. Words are spoken which can never, ever, be stopped in midair, pulled back into the mouth.