It took me a moment to realize but I was having an epiphany. I was standing in the middle of Times Square wearing nothing but purple tennis sneakers with the laces pulled out, clutching an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s in one hand and a shit-eating grin in the other. Rodney and Samantha stood about ten feet away, laughing their asses off as people walked by me without so much as a sideways glance. My clothes lay crumpled on the ground at my feet, my Redskins baseball cap upside down and jutting up out of my jeans like the crater of some long-dormant volcano.

There’s a light pulsing somewhere, its soft, amber glow gently seeping into the delicate skin covering my eyes, pooling in the tiny gullies on either side of my nose. My body feels heavy, burdened with the weight of a thousand year sleep.

I can hear someone whispering, like a mother quieting her small child: shhh…shhh…shhh…a pregnant pause taking shape and growing between each whisper, bringing life to the next series of sounds. They last no more than a few seconds, these brief acts of creation.