It was raining. A strange kind of rain, it didn’t get you wet enough to be bothered to go in for your jacket, but only just enough to be troublesome. The raindrops hit my face (and my long sleeves, long pants and long hair left there nothing else to be hit) often enough that I, normally, would have found myself in that same state of discomfort—nearly but not quite enough to instigate any real action. Fortunately for me, I wasn’t normal.

I stood there on the curb, and watched other people standing, or walking, or doing whatever else it is that common people do downtown at eleven o’clock at night. I stood there, chin up and back straightened, and realized that I wasn’t slouching. It was strange: I had always felt overconfident and arrogant when I stood at my full height, a towering five-foot-two, but today—tonight—I didn’t. The rain became more and more insistent; it begged for my attention. I observed as people slowly found their ways indoors.

The wetness was beginning to bother me as well, but I stayed. I remained motionless, and focused only on motion. I watched the cars tear holes through the storm as they sped by, and I watched their headlights illuminate flash glimpses of the falling rain—long enough only to see a still portrait, and not a moving picture. I watched the light at the intersection change, and I wondered how many people stopped at that white line on the pavement because they thought that if they drove forward they would be killed, and how many people stopped because they were rightfully obeying the law. Then I wondered how many people were stopping at that white line and that red light only, only because they saw a color.

The rain let up for a moment, and the silence was interrupted only by the occasional roar of a cheap car passing by and the flickering hum of the streetlight beside me. I closed my eyes and emptied my body, and then my mind, of emotion: I’d always found it to be easier to think clearly outside the realm of emotion and focused only and entirely on thought itself. I thought about nothing, which is a very difficult thing to do. It reminds me of the old Chinese finger traps my mother used to take me to buy down at the carnivals out on the beach. We would stumble out our own little paths through fog thick enough to choke on, if you weren’t careful, and the only thing louder than the crash of the waves and the racket of the thrill rides was the jovial laughter of the children—my laughter. The harder you try to pull your fingers out of that finger trap, the harder it pulls back on you. The only way out of it is to purposefully make an effort to make less effort. It’s a strange and useful lesson.

Then came the moment when, in any other storm, lightning would have shattered the sky into shards and lit the world for a single second, a single second of light in a dark night. It didn’t. I looked up into the sky, and it stared back down at me, silent and dark. The sky doesn’t lose at staring contests. I blinked a raindrop out of my eye as I refocused my gaze on the gray city in front of me.

The rain became a substantial and noticeable force again, and my thoughts wandered away from my physical being once more. I couldn’t manage to dream at night, so I liked to invent my own dreams while I was awake.

I stopped seeing the city as it truly was, around me, and it began to melt. I saw the buildings as they blurred from realism into cubism into abstract watercolors—it was beautiful. After the world around me had become only a scenic backdrop, I felt a pure warmth, as if the sun had beaten the weather and warmed me from the inside out as opposed to the normal way of things. Slowly, gradually, the warmth turned into something more.

She came up behind me and wrapped her arms around my tense neck, and we breathed as one, together and at peace. I thought of making an effort to speak with her, but reconsidered. I stood (was I standing, still?) against her and savored the moment for what it was, and nothing more. She breathed my name. She repeated the word, and then moved on to more complex, involved ones. Then her beautiful, comforting words ceased to be words and blurred together into a perfect stream of bliss, the mind of one human pouring into that of another.

For one instant, there was nothing else on the earth I could have wanted, and I thought that maybe, maybe, humanity had a chance, and that people really could find the love inside themselves and learn to use it. And after that thought had occurred to me, once I understood what she had come to do, she faded away, as instantly and enigmatically as she had arrived. I wanted to fade with her, but I didn’t. I now knew that I wasn’t yet finished with this world.

My consciousness found its way back into reality, I slowly began to perceive and then interpret my surroundings, and I gazed out into the world—my world. I watched a man wait for the light to change to cross the road, and I listened for cars around the curve and heard nothing. He waited out the entire light.

Not even today could I fully express what happened to me in that moment. The rain was intensifying, and it was slowly becoming hail. The ice hit me as iron bolts, and as they did, they shed the rust from themselves—and from me. I was becoming something different, and as the weather gradually calmed, as the raindrops brushed me less and less frequently, I only felt them more and more. I was becoming increasingly aware of my environment, and I could feel my senses heightening.

Birds called for morning, but I was sure an evening had not yet passed. Yet I felt the sun even before it had broken the horizon. I focused my attention on it (and my attention now seemed to encompass everything around me—I’d been standing there for hours and I had not noticed the man sleeping under the awning down the road, or the squirrels waking up in the bushes across the way until now). The sky was almost clear, save one cloud sitting in the space the sun was about to occupy. Somehow, I knew I couldn’t move this cloud alone; I would need help.

I set out to unveil the sun. I let my eyes and my thoughts caress the sky as they made their way down to the distant mountains, onto the city, and into the present. I didn’t know what I was about to do, and even now most of the following days, months and years are a blur to me. But I know this: We never killed. We never attacked, or battled, or protested, or fought. We did as we had always had the choice but had never found the resolve to do. We stood up. We lived.

I raised my head towards the darkness, closed my eyes, and took the first step man had ever taken—forward.