He blinks, as if correcting a spell gone wrong, and lowers the cheese toward the real moon that hangs pale above the city. The roof remains under his boots, tar-sticky and cold, while satellites drift like patient insects through the dark. Somewhere below, a radio crackles from an open window, and the sound is so ordinary it nearly breaks him. Yet he seizes on the moon’s impossible distance and decides it is not a joke but a challenge, one requiring scholarship, industry, and a proper launch.

The idea of a rocket science degree strikes him like a heroic quest banner unfurling in his chest. He imagines libraries as wizard towers, equations as runes, and laboratories as forges where steel dreams are tempered into ascent. For the first time, the world does not resist his fantasy; it absorbs it, redirects it, and asks for persistence instead of prophecy. Behind him, the city hums with a thousand unromantic mechanisms, and in that noise there is a path more real than any enchanted road he has yet walked.