This will be the biggest decision he’ll ever have to make, so he attempts to summon it.

It’s always there, a part of himself that he accepts. He has come to rely on it. He assumes that everyone possesses it.

Sometimes it surfaces often. A little distant. Muffled, like when your name is spoken from the other room as you’re watching a loud scene in a movie. He isn’t sure if he actually hears it, or imagines it. He bunches up his eyebrows and listens hard.

Other times, weeks pass without the slightest whisper. When it comes, though, its deafening emergence bludgeons his gray matter. He straightens under the blow, his muscles racked, his bones aching through tension.

He can usually tell when it will choose to appear. Often, he can even call on it by resolve. He meditates. Sitting on a doorstep, or at his computer, he closes his eyes and it forms in his mind, as abruptly as smoke turning back into the flaming log from which it came. He just has to ask the right question.

But, this time, no response comes.