Fingerprints in four sentences

I must be dreaming, thought Shadow, alone in the darkness.

I think I just died.

He remembered hearing and believing, as a child, that if you died in your dreams, you would die in real life.

He did not feel dead; he opened his eyes, experimentally.

- Neil Gaiman from American Gods

Buba, barely up to my thigh in height, runs up to me and wraps his arms around my knee. “Yaya, look my mother bought me new shoes!,” he exclaims.

“They look very new Buba. This one here is your new shoe?,” I ask pointing to his right shoe.

“Yes and this one too Yaya, see this one too!,” he smiles pointing to his left shoe, and then he runs off with an enormously wide grin on his face.

---

His morning breakfast was an egg sandwich so layered with oil that it seemed to swell out of the sides like a steaming tea kettle ready to burst. He had lost count of how many of these gooey concoctions he had eaten over his term of service.

There was a silence between him and the man he was sitting with, but not an uncomfortable silence, just an indicator to the fact that there wasn’t much else to say on the subject.

After the extended pause he said quietly and with a look of abandonment, “Yeah. I think the day I return home to America, that will be the happiest day of my life so far.”

---

He had spent his morning frantically dashing around his office complex assisting the entire staff to print and compile hundreds of documents that were barely complete, proofread, or organized.

The lines under his eyes revealed a stress that had been quickly engraved into his face.

He looked to his American colleague and said, “It just doesn’t make sense, they’ve had months to plan this and still they are unprepared up until the last minute; very stupid.”

It was time for him to think about why he was doing the things he was doing.

---

The old chain was pulled, warped, and tattered in such a way that it would make a medieval metallurgist throw up his hands in frustration. The new chain was a fine piece of craftsmanship, but something that one could find at any bike shop back home for $29.99.

The young bicycle repair boy, who must have been under the age of 13, stared at the new chain for a long minute, slowly nodding his head up and down in an approving fashion. He looked back up and exclaimed, “Wow, this, this is a chain!”

---

Your first time in any new place is difficult, let alone when it is a place of religious significance. I was happy but admittedly nervous to be invited to our local mosque for the first time, just five city blocks and a few goats, donkeys, and chickens down the road.

When I first entered the mosque I saw one elderly man slowly shake hands and greet everyone inside one by one, while another two equally respectable looking men merely greeted those nearby to where they intended to sitting. I saw this contrast of manners as I took my first steps into the mosque and thought, how am I supposed to infer the culturally appropriate thing to do from that?

---

There was life to be lived with the advice given, “Wherever you go and whatever you do, do so without fear but with confidence.”

It was nighttime, and despite the soft glow of the city, the stars were bright and maternally encapsulating.

On the rooftop, he was surrounded by those particular people that he could spend the day with saying nothing, and it would feel like the day had been spent in endlessly engaging conversation.

In spite of these facts, why was there an air of “sehnsucht?”