When I was 18 I spent a few weeks in Fire Island at my friend Ryan’s father’s house. Ryan’s dad was gay. Ryan wasn’t my boyfriend but we used to fuck. I used to love lying with him in bed, or sneaking out to the pool, or onto the beach, and talking all night long, holding each other, taking turns fucking each other, kissing and telling each other all our dreams. We both wanted so much back them: I’ve always been the kind of person who wants it all: every last thing life has to offer me. I’ve always been that man who wants every experience, good or bad, all the beauty and all the ugliness. At 18 all i wanted was to fall in love, to fuck the world, to rise as high as I could, and then to freefall as deep as possible.

At 18 I believed everything was possible.

One Saturday night I had stayed out at the club after Ryan had gone home. It was beautiful: the night warm: balmy, the sky that endless sparkling brilliance that happens only in my memories: the world lit up in fire.

I was high and drunk: all around me men danced and laughed, fucked right there on the dance floor: stomping their feet and howling up into the sky: screaming out our names as loud as we could.

I decided to walk home along the beach, on those wooden planks that make up so much of Fire Island. In the dark I heard men laughing and moaning and I stepped off the planks onto the dune, in search of adventure.

It was like stumbling into a magical ceremony: a coven of witches: a circle of warlocks. In a dip in the dune, hidden from the walk way, a group of 20 or so guys stood around passing joints and bottles of wine, taking turns fucking this stunning muscle guy bent over a large tree trunk that must have found it’s way to the shore from the depths of the ocean.

Sitting alone on a rock was a dark haired boy with a thick beard and even thicker glasses. He couldn’t stop watching as men took turns pounding themselves into the muscle guy.

I sat on the rock next to him. He told me his name was Adam. He was getting his PH’D in Theoretical Physics and was on the Island for a wedding.

I offered to split a tiny blue pill I found in my pocket with him.

“What is it?” he asked me.

“I have no clue,” I laughed. “But it makes everything really fucking beautiful.”

We made out on that rock and he told me how the world was not how it looked: that the physical world was a deception: a lie, but that the truth was there, hiding, playing a game with us: calling out to us.

“You can see it if you really look. Out of the corners of your eyes. Reflecting in the surfaces all around us.” He took my hand in his, his lips brushing against my lips: I felt my heart quicken, my dick was so hard it hurt. “You and me. This separation: it’s a lie. There is nothing between us. You and me, we are connected.”

We ended up leaving the Coven of fucking Magicians and walked to the edges of the world, the ocean dark and stunning, the moon a sliver of gold. He kissed me and told me that he believed that we were endless beings: infinite and forever.

He kept saying those words to me. “We are infinite and forever.”

When the sun began to rise he told me he had somewhere important to be. When we kissed goodbye I felt what he had said to me: infinity and connectedness: I felt forever.

Later that day Ryan and I walked home along the beach from the gym. Ahead of us was a wedding: a man and woman standing on the edges of the Ocean. When we got closer I saw the man was Adam. For a moment our eyes connected, and then he looked away, to the woman he would marry.

“That’s so crazy,” Ryan said. “Do you think his wife knows?”

I can’t escape the feeling of magic. Of something larger than life happening to me. Those moments, our bodies pressed together, the taste of his breath, the smell of him: I can’t escape that feeling that we knew each other. For who we really were.

That we had been meant to find each other. Just for that one night.

“We are infinite and forever,” he said to me.

I feel it. 31 years later. I can feel the way those words became a part of me. Defined me.

31 years later I can feel what it was he was saying to me: that there is a magic in this world, a purpose and a meaning, it is burning right there in front of us. It is ours if we choose it.

Infinite and forever. Burning bright and strong.

I can close my eyes in this moment, here and now, and still taste him: I can feel the warmth of his skin, the timbre of his voice.

Connected.