There was a shift in his core.
There was no other way for David to explain it: one minute, he was dicking away on his phone, switching from matching games to video apps and back to pass his eight-hour shift, and the next, he had to check to see if he was still sitting in his chair, because he felt... lighter. Set adrift into the cosmos even though he was still in his guardian booth.
What was harder to explain was, when he gazed up into the sky, David thought I want to go home.
Not in the usual way, where he sometimes hated his job and couldn't wait to hurry back to his apartment where he could scarf down his leftover shrimp scampi while watching a true crime documentary, but in a way that he did not belong here. This species, this planet. This domain. Stepping out of his booth and still gazing at the quickly darkening sky, David pulled his uniform jacket tighter around him, hugging himself like he was a child all over again as he looked to the clouds for the beyond, for the exit.
"-- cosmic sort of love."
David's head whipped back to his booth. He scampered back inside and snatched up his phone, where an ad began playing on a video he forgot to pause. A slender, blond-haired man draped in a flowing white gossamer robe seemed to float in a pool of glitter, violet on one side and powder blue in the other. The man reached into the bi-colored sea beneath him, and in both hands, he pulled out bottles of perfume and cologne. When he sprayed them both on his neck, the effects had the colors swirl and mix together underneath him, and he was adrift in a sea of gold stars.
David could not recall the man's stage name, only knew that some of his friends and their kids are insane about him and his group. And yet, when the man opened his eyes and gazed lovingly into the camera, his blue eyes dusted with shimmering black eye shadow, and said, "Star-Crossed Lovers by Mx.Gianni," David knew his true name. He gingerly stroked the screen with trembling fingers, feeling himself become undone and reborn just by looking at this beautiful man. When his touch accidentally skipped the ad, he searched for it and sat down, watching it over and over.
He knew then that it was time.