“L-I-Q-O—”

“Wrong!” he yelled. Another shot.

“L-I-Q-U . . . O—”

“Wrong!” he said again, giddily. Another shot.

“I shouldn’t be allowed to take shots of this stuff if I can’t spell the word,” I slurred.

“I don’t make the rules,” Jahan said.

We left the bar at five in the morning. It hit me as I watched Jahan twisting the key in the rusted padlock that if I was back home, I would have been alone in my room, feeling—what was the opposite of drunk? Sober. I would have been so sober.

There wasn’t a single other person on the street outside the bar as we walked. But the way it was lit—warmly, oozing orange and yellow, extending an invitation to any and all—I felt more alive than ever. There was something tugging at my chest, like I’d been accepted into a special secret society.

Jahan asked where I was staying, and I suddenly sobered up, remembering I would have to check out of my Airbnb later that day. I told him where it was, expecting Jahan to point me in the right direction. But it turned out Jahan lived just around the corner. He offered to walk me back. I smiled. After a shitty past couple of days—months, really—I was so happy the universe had at least given me this little bit of serendipity.

We took the long way home, because Jahan wanted to show me Piazza Santa Maria, the main square in our neighborhood, Trastevere. It was massive and inspiring, with a few stragglers humming around the bursting fountain in the middle. “The sound of that fountain always reminds me of children laughing,” Jahan said. And the way he said it, with his eyes ambling to the side, just over the tip of the church—it wasn’t a story. It wasn’t meant to entertain. It was just Jahan.

We looped around the piazza, back to the main road that crossed the Viale, a sort of mini-highway. I started tightrope-walking along the grooves of the tram rails, and Jahan looked at me and laughed. “How old are you, Amir?” he asked.

“Old enough to be in Rome by myself,” I said.

“Fair enough,” he replied. “Though, to be honest, I thought you were on a family trip and had snuck out for the night. It’s what I would have done.”

I stumbled off the tram rails, and Jahan jumped on. “And what are you doing in Rome?” he asked.

“Writing,” I said, because it seemed as good a bullshit answer as any. Though in a way I was figuratively rewriting my life. I mean, who isn’t a writer in the figurative sense of the word?

Jahan chided me for being a writer who doesn’t know Joni Mitchell and therefore a disgrace to our entire species. I remembered that he was an actual writer, a poet. Neil had told me just earlier that day.

“Oh, you can’t trust anything that man says. He’s sick,” Jahan said. “Sick in love. His boyfriend, Francesco, is proposing to him in two weeks, on his thirtieth birthday.” He winked at me then, and I felt that in trusting me with that secret, he was inviting me deeper into this secret society of Americans in Rome. “If you insist on assigning labels, then yes, I’m a poet,” he said. “But I’m a procrastinator, too, so that should tell you how much poetry I actually write.”