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“Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.”
        - Jack Kerouac

present. in fact, more present than he could remember being for months: this breath, this air, this...

light. (look at that light!)

he stopped, stared at the white-washed wall, keenly aware of every sense he could name.

physically motionless, yet spinning wildly: obsessed with the notion that a little burst of light-energy had traveled millions of miles across darkness to intersect this exact space and time, and project this image onto this wall.

he reached for the camera.

silhouettes. shadows. inherently us, yet, also the absence of us. the us from just a moment before. he thought briefly of a short by ray bradbury that made him cry in elementary school, and then the tears he hid because he was in class, and new to that school, and didn't want others to pick on him. and how later, in high school, he learned how that the short story referenced a poem by a completely different author and how much he liked that there was an entirely new dimension to that totally familiar thing.

...and then, having raced over jumbled memories spanning half a lifetime, he lowered his arms, turned to face the sun and considered, "is it possible to be in love with the very act of falling in love?"

...

it was really that simple: an unbridled train of thought that sped across a series of experiences until being derailed entirely by a seemingly innocuous non sequitur.

the instant passed in much the way it arrived: silhouettes stepped back into to shadows, the ship sailed forward on tide waters pulled by the moon, the planet spun on its axis, whilst hurtling around the sun. (without ceremony, the system resets.)

excluding local trips to the grocery store—or, say out to the coast—he (like everyone he knows, and everyone you know) has travelled about 584 million miles since that instant, that self-reflection, that seemingly innocuous non-sequitur.

a truly great distance.

so great, that it is rather incomprehensible, really. in all that travel, all that time, it would be easy to suggest that we might all stumble across answers to our questions much the way that we might stumble across missing house keys. or that sweater we wore every day last winter. or that friend we haven't seen--or honestly, thought of--since elementary school.

but, no.

yet unanswered, the question has rattled around as an over-thought-thought, slowly forged with time and consideration into a kind of diagnostic laser. a tool used both to highlight and analyze a catalog of life experiences past, and present. a tool that is far too sharp to be used in a non-laboratory environment. a tool that he is only very recently realized is slowly, casually, setting fire to the building.

the fire! full circle....

he smiles again, thinking back to the originating short story, and how this haunting question was, in its own way, yet another entirely new dimension to a totally familiar thing.

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The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlour. The parlour into cellar, cellar into sub-cellar. Deep freeze, armchair, film tapes, circuits, beds, and all like skeletons thrown in a cluttered mound deep under.

Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.

Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone.

Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam: “Today is..."
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        - Excerpt from: "There Will Come Soft Rains," by Ray Bradbury

...but even as he said it—he knew—it was far too late.

i swear it will be warm.