Event is a strong word. What happened was that I encountered—bear with me, that’s also not the right word—sentences. As if they were creatures, entities (we know they are entities). And the problem is that I can’t quote them to you. They’re lost; they were too precise to withstand reentry from the dream. I can only paraphrase them, name them, denting them along the way.

There was Longing #1, an extended, complex sentence that was really more of a list—there may not have been a verb in it at all, or not an active one—of first encounters (you’ll have guessed I experienced all of this in relation to S, somehow, without acknowledging it at the time).

The list is lost to me, though some remnants remain: first touch through clothing; first gesture of removing glasses for an unmediated, reciprocated look (Do I somehow know that S wears glasses? I don’t think I do); first tears; first involuntary utterance—“yes”; first confession of desire; but also the lips, the soles of the feet, the asshole, the shadowy region behind the ear.

There was Rage without Remorse, which was a political sentence, written in invisible ink—I intuited this somehow. It slid around me like a snake, everywhere it touched became electric. Just describing it now: pinpricks on my right collarbone and under my left breast.

And there was Longing #2, an embarrassingly simple sentence that expressed tempered impatience, a particular relation to watching. Tempered is not the right word, the relation was less comforting than that. I can’t imagine (and this is the point) what Longing #2’s words were. I return from the sentences abruptly, without warning, to the couch. Kim still beside me, his elbow against my rib. The film on the screen isn’t the one we’d been watching when I departed; in my fugue state, I must have missed the changeover to the earlier version (1940). A giant bowl of popcorn has appeared on the coffee table. I reach for a handful; Kim shifts in response, suddenly shy about our sustained contact. The credits roll, and as if we hadn’t just been sitting silently for more than three hours, our voices find themselves, and then they find one another again.