I want to live in the places of our mind. I want a free ride on the things that we aspire to. Haven’t I felt empathy for the unfortunate, predicted the events of the planet, conceived of great inventions and works of art that I would accomplish, if only I had the time? I’ve seen us, too, in my mind. We are in perpetual amazement with each other, honest without the slightest loss of mystery, somehow at the top of our arcs, with all the time to dazzle the world, and all the time to idle like a picnic with each other.

What is this awful place where we actually live, this city named for a better one, one that is a legend, and is mostly a myth? Are we, collectively, so dull that we cannot even name a river? Maybe you and I could never be together, we would try to escape but not quite manage, we would go to the end of the world, and still we’d be there, mechanical in our language, and like the actuaries or adjusters of romance, systematically disproving the best that we’d imagined, systematically hedging against the worst.

When I was a child, I hoped that later, ten or twenty years later, I would not know the difference between the things I had experienced, the things I had dreamed, and the things I had imagined.

I have kept the phrases my friends and I made up. A teenager is “a case of ginger ale”, empty praise from the human resources director is “a licorice reward”, and the rocks that reach out into the bay of the small town where I grew up is “where the dragon fell asleep a thousand years ago”. There are others I can tell you if we meet. These phrases are the best things I am keeping. The things I left behind were difficult to part with. Otherwise there would be no virtue in giving them up. There was a Spanish helmet everyone thought preposterous, but that I loved. There was my guitar that, miraculously, stayed in tune for three straight years. There was my best friend.

Is it crazy to take a bus this far? The route follows secondary roads where towns have had time to grow, places you cannot reach any other way. The curves, the stops, the boredom. I only wish it could take longer. I wanted this so badly. I could have flown, but that would ruin it—too clean, too impersonal.

When I arrive I will step straight down onto the broken asphalt of the parking lot. I will part my lips to breathe and let the dry air dry me, Austin. I will be in the thick of your scent, your dust. Any change worth making has to come up from the ground with the heat, has to press against the soles of the feet.

I don’t know who you will be; I have rinsed my expectations clean. But I want to feel that rush of nerves, to laugh with you without knowing where laughter leads, to kiss you without knowing how a kiss can thrill. And you will give me a new phrase.

Have you ever felt completely frenetic, only to realize you are bouncing around on a short spring? How does the air taste where you live?

What is the creepiest present you can receive?

That day, you were standing with me in the tunnel, rigid and transfixed. The ocean under glass, you told me. A minute later you asked, did I want to see an immortal?

You led me by the hand into the research section, a place that reminded me of university—data posters on the walls, desks with computers and stray bits of equipment. Then into your office, full of the fossils of sea vertibrates hundreds of millions of years old. Some of the species you showed me live now. Some of them are extinct, including your favourties. I don’t remember all their names. I remember the jellyfish, Turritopsis nutricula, tiny and nacreous, never dying, but as you explained, a reincarnation that comes at the cost of its memories.

We could play a game like that, take a drug that prevented the formation of memory, meet each other again and again for the first time. Unlike these jellyfish, we could take notes for our future selves. But I know those movies have been written, and I know all of humanity has come before and left us their notes, history and literature. You added, all of natural history has come before and left us its notes, and you put a fossil back onto your desk.

I remember the poster you backed up against, algae populations against ocean depth, as you drew me to you. Not the lips, you said, opening the neck of your blouse and bringing my head there.

Who would not want a return to childhood, to live again and again, endlessly grow old and revert to innocence? But even the immortal medusae are vulnerable, you said later; even the most wonderful of creatures are sometimes lost.

You must know that I still visit the tunnel under the aquarium.

Now is never the future.

One year, you are perfectly comfortable in a crowd, on a train, swimming in the ocean, walking under an open sky. One scar later, everything about crowds, trains, oceans, or skies is forever changed.

We have so few dangerous coming of age ceremonies nowadays. What ever happened to fighting a tiger, knocking out a tooth, going off into the wild to fend for yourself until the white paint wears off?