Liminophilia

With an elegant flourish, Sylvia placed her signature on the last page of the document. She capped her Watermark pen, set it on the desk and swiveled her chair to gaze out the floor-to-ceiling window of her executive office. Dusk was setting in but she wouldn’t leave yet. She swiveled back around and unlocked the bottom drawer of the desk, pulling out a glass and a bottle of single-malt Macallan scotch.

It had been one hell of a year. Unlike most people she had met on this space rock we call Earth, Sylvia thrived in uncertain conditions. There was this adrenaline that came from solving problems others wouldn’t dare to tackle (or at least didn’t like to). There was a beauty that lay in the “getting there” of it all.

It drove her soon-to-be ex-husband wild. Why can’t you just be content with staying still and not have to constantly be in flux? He would ask. True to form, she had genuinely relished their year of trail separation—re-learning past facts about herself, finding a new place, and researching tedious litigation details.

In addition to signing the divorce papers, today she had signed off on the final construction plans for the bridge whose design she had spearheaded. It had been a year of painstaking calculations. She had always loved bridges for their architectural typification of transitional moments. After all what was life but just a bridge between birth and death? Sylvia leaned back, sipped and sighed satisfactorily. Now, to the next.