After the snap rave session, without thinking twice about what was happening, I began writing something which I’ve not only tried, and failed, to put on paper several times in the past few years, but have also repeatedly failed to document and describe in journal entries: postscript. A name which I never grasped until that night.

The product was easily the most coherent and effective effort thus far, to orient myself and my perspective such that adapting the transcription afterward was almost effortless. There was no remainder to puzzle or panic over, no irreconcilable piece – not a word. I saw the method itself, its first volume completed and waiting in comprehensive manuscript. Of the remaining volumes, I could discern no detail; only the impression of the second, and the ghostly notions of the others. It was enough.

So.

May I tell you a secret?

The morning after the day we met, you got out of bed about a minute after I did. I was sitting alone at the corner table when you walked past on my right, straight toward the window, without looking my way. Through thickening insomniac fog, for a moment, you and the ward and the world appeared to slow, nearly stopping. Only for a moment. Just long enough for it to occur to me that you were the coolest thing I had ever seen. A moment, of dry ice for spinal fluid; you were so fucking cool that it hurt.

so fucking cool it hurts is what I wrote on the folded notebook paper in my back pocket, a couple of hours later.

While you stood waiting at the window, I was sure that you were glowing. Just slightly.

My vision was still a little blurry and I hadn’t actually thought not to be gawking at you when you turned around, but you still didn’t look over as you walked past the table again, down the hall, toward your room, definitely glowing. Very slightly.

Only a few seconds later you reappeared at my right shoulder, turning the corner just behind me, squeezing between the back of my chair and the wall. I felt your left hand fall on my left shoulder.

“Good morning,” you said, taking the chair adjacent to mine.

‘Morning’ is what I would have said, but you spoke again first.

“Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in a ditch. He could not sleep. Or would not sleep.”

“Um.”

“He did not sleep.”

“Oh,” I said, catching on. “Please stop.”

“No,” you slapped my leg under the table, “shut up.”

Not my leg. But before I could speak or think or flinch, you continued.

“Every morning, the boy climbed out of his ditch and walked, always toward the sun, searching for a place where he could finally sleep.”

I hadn’t ‘caught on’ to anything.

“At noon, he stopped and wondered what the sun was having on its lunch break, until his shadow reappeared at his heels, pushing him back the way he came.

“Every evening, as the sun kissed the end of the world, the boy saw his ditch in the distance ahead. As night began to fall, he broke into a run. Some nights, running as fast as he could, he could make it a few steps beyond the ditch before the darkness stopped him in his tracks.

“Every night, he crawled back into his ditch and sat, chainsmoking and waiting for the sun.”

Something inside me had folded. No tears, no sense, no feeling, no thought whatsoever came through. I was nothing at all but listening to you.

“One night, as he sat waiting, he could not shake the feeling that he was being watched. Distracted, it was some time before he noticed that the cherry had fallen from his cigarette into his lap and burned clean through his pants; in the front and out the back without touching him.

“He stared through the holes at the cherry, still glowing at the bottom of the ditch. It was still burning when he noticed another small circle of soft white light appear beside the hole in his lap.”

A look.

I snapped back from the ditch to the corner table, mesmerized, barely catching some cue, and glanced down.

In my lap, to the left of my jeans’ zipper, were two small, round white pills. Almost by reflex, my left hand moved to cover them.

“Oh, said a voice from above.”

My eyes found yours again.

“The boy looked up.”

A smile.

“Oh, boy said the moon, what do you have there?”

You know all of this.

What I never told you is that when I climbed out of my bed that morning and staggered down the hall and past your pitch dark doorway, for the briefest moment, for the very first time, I felt your eyes on me.

I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d felt, until a minute later when you emerged from the hallway, looking like you had been awake for some time.

So cool that my neuroses were superconducting. So beautiful that seeing you seemed like sacrilege.

And you had been watching for me in the dark.