How long has it been?, he asks himself silently. And he honestly doesn’t know — time has stretched and compressed and warped so much that the ten years his math tells him could be a day or a century. How long since I didn’t feel like a machine, like an emotionless computer processing 0s and 1s and not much more?

The rain blows against the window at his head, soft chit repeating at irregular intervals as the wind shifts. A cat paces back and forth at the foot of the mattress, whining quietly that his usual spot is not easily accessible. There’s the familiar whir and occasional puff of cool from the tower fan to his left. There’s a smell of clean shampoo, fruit-scented? and WONDERFUL, and the weight of her right arm across his chest, firm but light as an autumn ocean breeze. Cool, soft, alien but so familiar from his wandering daydreams. Her hand on his shoulder, touching the tattoo, her fingernails occasionally digging as she dreams of whatever beautiful aliens dream of.

The past years, he had suspected he was slipping away from himself. There were moments of his old and familiar self, but fewer and further between as the decade had progressed. Hobbies had fallen to the side, passion projects had run out of steam, and inspiration had been muted, barely a whisper in the fog of his nights. The one constant had remained working with computers — solving problems with a tool that did what and only exactly what you told it to do. Little wonder, then. Easier to think in 0s and 1s than admit you’ve gotten too lazy and tired to keep up with the people around you. It’s admonishment that echoes in his head routinely, motivation mistaken consistently for self-deprecation. Easier to bury your feelings than admit people don’t seem to understand or care.

Her forehead is pressed gently against his cheek, her bare abdomen and hips solidly against his. He listens to her breathing softly, and is convinced for a moment that this is all a dream, nothing more than a dream, a passing jumble of neural signals he’ll forget with the dawn. I need a camera, he thinks. A full range view of this room, this moment, this beautiful human beside me. And the talent to use it, to capture this, that it’s not forgotten and lost in the shadows of my brain. He feels her leg crooked over his, soft and cool and so comforting, feels her gentle breath on his neck, smells the slight undertones of bourbon and cigarette.

He takes in the details, every one, from her head to her toes and back, again and again. Repeats what he sees, hears, smells, feels, more granularly with each pass. Draws an image, carves a tableau, ingrains the essence of a three-dimensional holograms, over and over and over until the moment is as real inside as out.

And smiles. Not in binary, not with the purpose of solving a problem, not with concern for tomorrow or yesterday, but at peace and in the moment, words and sensations his own camera.