For a moment, just a moment, you found it; so brief a time, perhaps like something you saw out of the corner of your eye, a glimpse in passing, that you wonder if it even happened at all. What was to you something rare, unique, was to her another page in the story, as interesting and noteworthy as the many chapters before it. You struggle to make sense of it all.

The sway and dance of light and shadow playing on the wall cast an image at once tantalizingly real yet ever-changing, elusive, defying logic. You reached out and tried to grasp it in your hand.. but your hand closed on nothing. Far beyond the edge of your comprehension, farther still beyond the nebulous expanse of your imagination, lies the true source. The gap of understanding between the soft images and filtered warmth you have come to care for, and the reality of their origin, is more vast than you realize.. and bridging that gap would have chipped away at the foundations of the world you have built for yourself, your sense of reality that you so tightly and desperately cling to.

How fortunate that you only caught a glimpse.. had your hand closed upon the source itself, it would have left you burned.