We are who we are. Ultimately this is the most crushing truth, and yet the most liberating. Dante Bustamante has figured out in almost two decades what most of humanity still struggles with every single moment of every day. In their thoughts about the future, their inclinations tainted by experiences past, their temptations and yielding, their worries and anxieties and nights spent crying into their pillows, they miss it.

These are the steps that will bring me to my death, Dante is thinking. He stops to look at the rain and suddenly all things come at him. He has never been so alive.

Dante’s mind is still screaming words, words he does not recognize right away. Words, meanings, like, Nirvana must know, and Keebs is taking pictures, and Nothing will ever feel better after this. His own words fly past him like the driving rain.

Let’s talk about the driving rain.

Let’s talk about the fifty-something days the waters of Southern California, halfway across the world, finally found their way to spatter gently against Dante’s eyelashes. Molecules both agitated and serene in the upstanding dances of torrential downpour whisper thrilling stories of lives forever touched and lovers forever changed. Dante listens the way he would listen to comforting stories of old friends made in battle. His entire-ness engages so wholly and so securely to the urgency of the passing moment that his mortality is no longer relevant, his doom no longer an issue that concerns him.

Perhaps it is this that will save the ones we love the most, the suspension of time, the dissipation of the past and the future, the in-your-face imposition of the now: listen to me, I am here, nothing else matters. The kagluyag cannot touch us now.