“Yes. What’s the downside?”

He smiled at me. “We don’t know that yet.”

I breathed in. Like I’d pick cleaning out kitchen cupboards with my perpetually disappointed mother over this. As if.

“Well then, yes,” I said.

“You’re with me?” he said. “You’re in?”

“Of course I’m in.” Though I had no idea what that meant.

He closed his eyes for the quickest moment, and when he opened them again and looked at me, something shifted in the air around us. Maybe even the air itself. The light changed and it fell away, a veil, the finest curtain, so that I could see the paths that birds carved up and down the blue sky, count the million points of light on the water, feel the singular oneness of every grain of sand and every atom in my own body. Strong. Like we were the exact same thing.

“What’s happening?” I said, and he smiled again.

“I told you. Everything. All at once.”

Either I was disappearing into my surroundings or they were disappearing into me. I inhaled the whole world, drew it into me cool and clear, and then exhaled it again, letting it go, putting it back, warm with the heat of my blood, over and over again. The world was my lungs and my lungs were the sea and the sea was everywhere.

“Hello Now,” Novo said, and I said, “What?” because all life was so loud in my ears suddenly, I didn’t think I’d heard him right. I didn’t know yet that it was the spell cast, right then, in that moment, and all the known rules thrown out. I didn’t know it was the start of something wild and unforgettable, impossible and true.

“Hello Now,” he said again, smiling, not just at me, but at all of it. Everything. “Oh, and look. Here’s another Now. Hello to that one too.”

•   •   •

The colors were beyond brighter. The details were infinitely sharper. Words can’t work hard enough to keep up with that sudden change in the fabric of everything. I can’t make them tell it right. We glowed, the two of us, sitting there. We were the whole world and we were nothing but atoms. I could feel the white heat of the sun rising right off my skin. Somewhere both other and also the same, the beach around us carried on as normal—the swimmers and surfers, the kids with their buckets, the rocks and the dogs and the wheeling gulls, the constant water. I was there too, with everyone, on the sand, and I was also elsewhere. I was the rock on the ground and the kite tied to it, stretching and flexing high up in the thin air. I was both. We were both. That’s what it felt like, to me.