THE PRESENCE

He had regrets, do you?  Are yours well founded?  His were.  Has the thought of being someone else ever entered your mind?  It entered his mind all the time. He pictured himself a college professor more times than he could count.  He imagined himself a business leader, a corporate manager, an owner of his own company. 

He was an engineering genius, a best-selling author, a celebrity, in his mind.  There was nothing he could not do or be, he was convinced.  None of it was who he was, then or now, though, was the problem. 

The die was cast before he was born, genetics maybe, and then the social conditioning of his youth.  And circumstances.  Was it circumstances that explained the presence in him?   There was this undertow throughout his life.

Fast forward.  He was now the only thing he could ever be, the only thing he ever was, which he did not even have a name for.  He did not have a box to put it in.  There was just the presence.