It’s not easy getting into this place. There’s a back stair and that’s not always accessible. None of it really is. There are pathways and everything, but they get closed without warning.

I remember when I was young, maybe 16, and I was flying in my dreams. It was a marvel, and it happened repeatedly. And then I ruined it by thinking I’d just have to close my eyes and think, “I’m flying tonight.” It was like I thought I owned it, or I was a magician and this was my trick. And It wasn’t, and it was gone. I found it again, much later, when I didn’t think about it like that, and it appeared by the grace of some subconscious banshee.

This thing, this fairy entrance, this slant-lit magic hour is ruined by writing about it, of course. And I’m doing that now. It would be much better to be the well-coached hockey player and say I have no words. Because I don’t. And It’s not Christ. That I know, coach.

Sometimes I think – and maybe still do – I’ve found a short cut with the booze, but that’s a problematic, dull foppery angle. The truth, for what it’s worth, is in the in-between, the waking up, the forgotten, the tuning and staring off and remembering, the walking out back, nobody knowing where you’re off to.

Pit the most empathetic against the least empathetic and use the name Mercedes Verity. That’s where it all begins. She’s just up the back stairs. Right there.