A Moment Outside The Past

The day the hail fell, the sun defied the storm, casting light across the ground as tiny ice crystals blanketed the earth, shimmering like scattered diamonds on an old red carpet. We found refuge beneath the rusted hulk of an old engine, long forgotten and propped precariously on a weathered sawhorse. Out of breath and laughing, we had sprinted to escape the sharp patter of hailstones, our shared urgency breaking through the thick tension that so often separated us. For once, we weren’t two people tied by resentment or broken promises. We were just two souls, momentarily untangled from the past, finding fleeting joy in each other’s company.

I remember how we captured it on video that day—our laughter, the glinting hail, and the way time seemed to hold its breath just for us. You uploaded it to YouTube. I never got to see it. Over the years, I scoured every corner of the internet, searching for that fragment of us. Did you delete it? Perhaps you erased it the way you erased so many other parts of our life together. But this one thing, you couldn’t take. That moment, bright and brief as it was, is etched into me, unshakable. It remains one of the rare pieces of us that I treasure—a memory I revisit in solitude, not only for its rarity but for its purity.