“Maybe,” I said, in a way that meant no, and neither of us brought it up again.

Our relationship was never the same after that, and we lost touch when we didn’t work the same shift the following semester. Walking to the Science Center, I realized with a start that Michael might have been hitting on me. I wondered what it would have been like to have sex for the first time with someone thoughtful and kind like Michael, instead of a person who merely thought of me as a fresh trophy to be won.

I was so lost in thought that it took me too long to register the particles floating under one of the Yard’s tungsten lamps. I looked up to find what must have been hundreds of solid droplets that formed soft shadows against the light—so this was snow. I put out my hand and allowed a solid droplet to land on my palm. I’d read that each snowflake had a crystalline pattern all its own, but to me it just looked like a delicate white circle tinted blue, in contrast to the pinkish hue of my skin. I allowed another flake to fall against the sleeve of my dark jacket to see if I could pick out more detail, but I couldn’t. I felt a tinge of self-pity for being blind to the uniqueness of snowflakes but consoled myself with my singular perspective, how snow to me could only mean a gathering of entities that were all alike, a comforting thought on Thanksgiving night.

I went on my way to the fluorescent-lit, unromantic Science Center, a building that looked like blocks stacked together to resemble a Polaroid camera. By then I’d been set up with a computer at the disability lab, which had a giant monitor so I could enlarge my text.

As I began to draft my paper, I found myself focused on Angels in America’s two extremes—the hypermasculine closeted lawyer Roy Cohn, who distances himself from his AIDS diagnosis, and the ultrafemme Prior Walter, a nonprofit worker who moonlights as a drag queen and tries to cope with the prospect of his longtime lover leaving him when he finds out Prior has the virus. Over a couple of hours as I refined my argument, I reread my favorite scene in the play, which starts with Prior looking in the mirror as he tries to make himself feel better by putting on makeup. A woman named Harper appears out of his reflection, a Valium-addicted Mormon whose husband works for Roy Cohn and is secretly gay. She tells Prior that she’s aware of his illness but that the deepest part of him is free of disease. When Prior asks her how she knows this, she says, “This is the very threshold of revelation sometimes,” and that phrase, “threshold of revelation,” became an immediate part of my internal lexicon, because it felt so inventive yet utterly familiar.