Everyone was poised and ready to go, making Neil and Susan’s wedding the happiest day of their lives. Poses were struck, dresses adjusted and with a flash, that was that. Happiness entombed forever in film and paper. It was only afterwards that everything started to decline.

The flash itself was the single brightest thing either of them had ever seen before. Little did they know that it was the brightest moment of their lives.

Neil and Susan weren’t bad people and wouldn’t have even got up to the wedding if they hadn’t loved each other, but the start of something new had taken root. How? The same way that any relationship begins to crumble. With small sacrifices of dignity and self respect toward one another, in exchange for the others’ affection and time. What Neil and Susan didn’t realise, however, is that the time would have been lost in any case.

Like sand slipping through fingertips, their marriage would slowly slip away from them as well. Why then, wouldn’t they fight for it? Every human being with an ounce of compassion, or at the very least self interest, which is essentially self compassion, would surely fight for something that they have a vested interest in? But no. Like a frog that is put into cold water, only to have it heated up and be boiled to death, Neil and Susan’s relationship would break down so slowly, and over the course of so many years, that neither of them would notice until it was too late, and neither of them had anything left, and couldn’t remember why they were there in the first place.

But for now, they would enjoy the rest of their wedding day, accepting praise and well-wishes from their close friends and family.