So that Saturday then, it was in Vaxholm at a venue with a winterized veranda that looked onto the quay, Zomby Woof was the second of four bands and stepped off the stage right before nine, after which he wove his way to my table by the window. I was solo, sober, alert as if the rest of my life hinged on these moments; I tried to achieve a state of wakefulness that was more than awake, a sort of absolute tension, senses wide-open. I felt void of history, as if I came from nowhere, as if the twentieth century had not happened in me for thirty years already and was now coming to an end, and when we stood up a couple of hours later we had not touched more than this: his index finger had at one point caressed the back of my hand. A few millimeters of skin touching for no more than a fraction of a second, but today, more than twenty years later, I can still recall the way it reverberated, how my blood no longer fit in my veins, the way my life no longer fit in me, the way it spilled over and stuck to everything else, already in the cab home and then at his apartment, several hours, a one-bedroom in Örnsberg with a narrow bed in a corner where our laughter ceased and was replaced by a gravity so demanding that it scared me, because it was no longer about pleasure but about something more fundamental, a room in me where everything was spacious and available, my childhood, my people, the connections between everything. “Desire” seemed like “desire” until I disappeared inside of it and stayed in there. It made a different kind of desire appear, an agreement about temporary magic, when places in us that could not touch did touch. To be permitted authenticity in the midst of this act, with not a single thought in my head, without imitation, to be permitted to wreck my life in peace once more. I was so close to myself in situations like this, right at the edge, but to find him there, in my own flesh, the fact that I was an introvert and still found him there, as if we’d always waited for each other and the sweat and the flame that became ours so fast.