And I was wondering: who was this guy? He’d been talking to me, we’d been swapping philosophies and personal histories for hours. Yet I didn’t know his name. And something he had just said (but I’d forgotten what because it didn’t matter) made me wonder his name and wonder if any of what he said would help me. I’d been fishing this man for solutions, but I hadn’t told him the problem.

"What do you reckon, though?" He snapped me back from my thoughts.

What was he fishing me for?

We’d gone from cafe to bar and then to some dusty street steps: where next?

"Don’t worry. Think about it later. Nothing’s important at this time of night, is it?"

And he smiled.

I felt like my eyes had closed and I was dreaming and that smile was flying like a feather in the breeze, but my eyes stayed open and watched the smile and I was awake, the kind of awake you only feel at that time of night. And I dreamed that my eyes opened and the smile settled on my pupils. I closed my eyes and locked that smile into a lifelong memory.

"Right," I said, because that’s how it felt. "What now?"

The smile nestling in my eyes made me realise that there was an urgency in the night: the friendship was clearly going to last only until dawn, so we had to use the time, really use the night. And in the morning, when I slept, the smile would sink in deep, settle.

He laughed and he nodded and grabbed my wrist and we ran and it was all one movement. Two parts of the same body.

I didn’t notice the point when we stopped running, but we must have done, because then we were lying on wet grass and laughing and shaking with the laughter and the cold.

Sooner or later, the laughing and the shaking fell away from us. Like soft, young hair off a moulting puppy. My fingers grew into his beard. I felt like they were mixing into the face. His hand, coldwet from the dew, materialised right on the skin of my small back, under my shirt. His hand was large, seemed to armour my whole breadth. The heat of my sweat, the cold of his dew: the skin melted together. This was closeness. This was silent, real friendship.

This friendship would last forever with the smile, though it would die with the daylight.

My worries died and now I was floating with my own smile.

"Tomorrow," he said, lying on his belly and looking at me, "go into a cafe somewhere and discover for yourself just how much peppermint tea can make your tongue tingle!" I giggled with the words and he tickled my ribs and I giggled with his fingers, fingers as big as real chips. "When you drip glue onto polystyrene, both of them kind of dissolve, in a little crater where the glue fell. Always feels like peppermint tea does that to your tongue."

Philosophy went flip, the sky turned navy.

"At least once in your life," I said, "use a naked beer gut as a pillow." He nodded.

Finding meaningful things to say while it fades.

I knew that we would stay close like this until I was too tired to stay awake, but I must stay awake as long as possible to make it last. And I’d probably fall asleep right here and wake up shivering and find him gone.

But that didn’t matter because that was some time into the future: only now mattered.

"What are you looking at?" he asked.

"I don’t know, but you’ll be gone before I figure it out." I answered, staring at one of his hands.

I felt my eyes closing, but I caught them just in time: he was still there.

"You don’t want this to stop, do you?" he said, and of course I shook my head.

"If you need it again, start it with someone new." And again, I shook my head. My eyes closed, but this time, I didn’t notice.

I opened my eyes to a gentle kiss on my lips. He was stood above me. The sky was so pale that I squinted. I don’t think he meant for me to wake up.

"What’s your name?" I asked.

"Make one up," he answered, and started to move away.

I smiled and closed my eyes again.