October wasn’t kidding. The cookies looked just like Oreos, only they were twice the size of the store-bought kind. I took them to the kitchen and ate one the same way I used to eat real Oreos when I was a kid—by twisting off the top, eating that first, and then eating the bottom half like an open-faced sandwich. The cookies tasted like real Oreos too, if real Oreos could ever be soft and fresh. I ate a second one and thought about how October told me she baked when she was anxious; I wondered what was on her mind.

After much internal debate, I sent her a text that said: Thanks for the cookies. She sent me back a smiley face. I hated when she responded with emojis because I didn’t know how to interpret them. In a moment of weakness, I typed Feel like hanging out? But I knew that was a bad idea and deleted it before I pressed “Send.”

There seemed to be a gaping hole in the night, down which I was in danger of falling. And here’s how absurd I got: I tried to send October a message telepathically. Much like my psychic relationship with Sam, I didn’t necessarily believe October could receive my communiqué, but I felt powerless in life almost all of the time, and attempting extrasensory contact was my way of pretending I was capable of controlling my destiny.

The bottom line was: I wanted to see her. So I closed my eyes and imagined that she was sitting on her couch and that my spirit was beside her, whispering in her ear, telling her that she wanted to see me.

I felt stupid after that. And because I didn’t want to be tempted to communicate with her like a normal person, I left my phone in the kitchen, took off my shoes and socks, and went downstairs to play.

I was in the mood for an acoustic and selected Cal’s Gibson SJ-200E, the guitar he’d used the night we played together at the dinner party. The Gibson had volume knobs and a pickup like an electric, so it was really more like an acoustic on steroids. According to Cal, the knobs and pickup were put there by the original owner, and Cal was told upon purchase that only two people ever did that to their acoustic guitars back when these knobs and pickups would have been installed: John Lennon and Elvis Presley.

“It’s probably a bullshit story,” Cal said, “but I choose to believe one of them owned this guitar.”

My choice was more specific. I chose to believe it had belonged to John Lennon, and I played “Across the Universe” in his honor as my warm-up.