It was five days of relax­ation, with some­one I could spill my guts to. The only per­son who knows every­thing about me, every embar­rass­ing expe­ri­ence I’ve had, every dark secret in the back of my mind. I could try, but I doubt that I would ever be able to explain my rela­tion­ship with John. Let the inde­scrib­able remain so.

Most of the time was spent in con­ver­sa­tion. In the car we would cruise. On the couches we laid our­selves out, both as shrink and patient. We revis­ited my old stomp­ing grounds, the uni­ver­sity cam­pus with its dull, right-angle archi­tec­ture. There was a bit of serendip­ity dur­ing his stay, the kind of hap­pen­stance that makes one ques­tion their sense of faith, fate, or lack thereof. After a series of ran­dom and cor­rect turns, it was a sud­den, rather ter­ri­fy­ing, con­fronta­tion of months of med­i­ta­tion on the sec­ond intro­duc­tion. Something I’ve been dis­cussing with John ever since I started writ­ing about it, some­thing I wasn’t ready for at all, and some­thing we hap­pened to catch on camera.