I even felt protective of him in that moment, surprised, and slightly awed, by the fact that he held on to such grand visions of what life could offer.

The intimacy of friendship, he wrote, lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another.

What was that thing we had learned in our rhetoric class, about Derrida’s “deferral of meaning” and how words are merely signs that can never fully summon what they mean? Yet words are all we have, simultaneously bringing us closer, casting us farther away.

I was quickly coming to the realization that my creative anxieties about whether there was anything original or new left to say about the world were quite generic.

I’d heard these songs hundreds of times before. But to listen to them with other people: it was what I’d been waiting for.

wanted to impose structure on all that had come before that July night, turning the past into something architectural, a palace of memories to wander at my own leisure.

We weren’t in search of answers. These weren’t debates to be won: certainty was boring. We were in search of patterns that would bring the world into focus.

had never heard Mojave 3, but their songs were perfect, like witnessing something beautiful happening in slow motion. I aspired to move through the world this deliberately.

We seemed to spend hours apart, occasionally intersecting in some unlikely aisle. Everything seemed a possibility, a clue, an invitation to experience new, unprecedented emotional realities. We were enthralled by the same music, but it showed us different things.