Nights through the maze of halls back to our houses from Envisioner sessions, Yusuf didn’t talk a whole lot—no big surprise there—leaving me to heft most of the load. I yammered about my life back in Boston, or the doc about Genesis. He filled the quiet with his lips and hands, on his narrow bed when we were alone. And we’d stop and laugh the first few times, some fumbling with okay, wait—you get over there and I’ll do that. And I’ll borrow some clichés from a different kind of movie, here, some breathy erotic thriller and we can cue the dreamy music and the moody camera angles down the landscape of Yusuf’s body. The curve of his muscled shoulders and arms. The lines of his tensed neck—head thrown back—that pointed with compass hands down to a silver medallion that glinted from his dark chest hair. A wine-colored birthmark below one nipple, with my mouth trailing lava down his stomach. The director, later, will watch the dailies and growl, we need more ass shots.

I told Yusuf, early on when we were both tangled up together so we wouldn’t fall off the bed, how I’d bombed my only physics class in high school with my whole slogging through a swamp of downers thing. I was curious about what he was doing here. And he jumped up like a live wire fell across his bare legs. Okay, okay, okay, he chattered to himself, poking through his desk drawers, and a backpack, and his lab coat slung over a chair until—aha!—he plucked a green marker and waggled it in the air. Still naked, his back to me, he sketched equations on the glass of his window. Okay. Wow. Where to start? Right. The basics. He doodled diagrams of an atom and its parts. Nucleus. Proton. And then a little chart where he sketched the names of all the elementary particles, his hands squeaking across the glass, and speaking so fast he could’ve sucked up all the air in the room.

“Is this too much?” he asked when he turned around and spotted the grin that took over my whole face.

“No, don’t stop,” I told him—which was something he said a little while ago, only in a very different context—loving how on-fire teaching me something made him.

I was laying on his bed, but I was just as much on an inflatable lounger, bobbing around a bath-water-warm pool in the sun. Because when you’re slogging through most of your life and a moment of joy like this hits, you know you just have to wade there as long as you can and let it fill you.

SCENE: THE BLACKBOX THEATER OF MY HEAD

NAREK