I didn’t expect to have an audience when I stumbled out of my cabin late one morning to take a leak.

My feet hit the worn wooden steps in the woods of Connecticut, where, like the other artists here, I was supposed to be head-down and plowing through my Great Work. Mostly, my head was foggy from last night’s weed. Unlike when I film and all bets are off, I don’t like to get high while I’m editing a doc, which is supposed to be all about discipline. Drinking water and eating vegetables and working all day, and all these other good habits I’d heard so much about. But last night, boxed in by the trees outside my windows, everything I’d lost the last few months bowled into me at once, dragging me into a pity-party of one.

I yawned, murky-mouthed, and blinked away the sleep while I battered the grass with piss.

“Sir?”

I jumped at the voice and turned, hand still down the front of my shorts and the other idly scratching a mosquito bite on my bare chest. Four men stood in front of the cabin. The closest guy was dressed in a light sweater and khakis, even in the scorching July heat. My first sight of the man I’d love so hard that I’d break through universes for him, and I thought, is this off-duty English lit professor lost in the woods?

I don’t believe in love-at-first sight lightning bolts and angels whispering you’ve just found your soulmate. And I know it sounds weird, but I love that I met him—probably the most important moment in my life—while grasshoppers bounced away from my piss stream in the grass.

“Yeah?” I asked, cocking my head.

The guy at the front cleared his throat and looked down at the ground. The other three were rooted to the earth, all earpieces, clenched jaws, and lumpy shapes under their black jackets. They looked like black ops personal trainers who could kill me three times before I hit the ground.

“Hayes Figueiredo?” the guy at the front asked, peeking down at a tablet in his hands.

“Who’s asking?”

“We need you to come with us.”

Behind the group, tall grasses swayed in the breeze.

And here’s where I die, I thought. I’ve been chased out of bars and had my ribs broken in alleyways. I’ve been tear-gassed in political riots. People who come to you knowing your name are never there to just chat. Worse when they’re smiling, when they’re needing. We need you to put down your camera. What use are you—really—in this village, or in this school, or in this bar with these sad and twisted people?