I figured everything out last night when we were drunk on the fire escape. I figured out what I was doing with my life, pretty much all of that, better than my therapist ever could. It was crystal clear. Everything was like that – my purpose, my fuck-ups, my dreams, my relationships. It was all like a story that I had written. I knew it all.

I remember my hand against the railing, the glass in my palm, the scotch tilted perfectly. That was when I told you about my writing, how it didn’t matter if I was published. It was the writing that mattered, being in the moment, conceiving of those things that made perfect sense, that when I went back to them, would make me see everything exactly how I wanted. I had written that thing just like I had wanted, as I had intended, even more than that. Like Apollo’s death. And getting resurrected.

And then we talked about my work, meticulous about everything, doing everything the best I could, working with people that do their work, but saying nothing and just doing the work, and deciding that I would need to decide when to stop and find something else, as fulfilled as it may have been, if it ever was, knowing that I was helping others figure out who they were, that there was an end to that. And this might be it.

And then the obvious stuff, the things that I had never really thought about but now I knew – like making the cream cheese for the icing, fixing the camera shutter, refilling the lighter, buying the right presents and not doing anything at all, just being silent. That’s when I was really listening to you. That was the best part of it, because you knew more than me about all of this. Your glass was empty by then and you didn’t seem to care. And I just wanted more and insisted on crawling back through the window to find the bottle empty. I didn’t feel so clear after that. I just knew that I known everything that I would ever know in those few moments and would have to let the nausea now pass.