I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

I sat tonight on a couch, curled up in a combined ball with a man nearly delirious from sleep deprivation, trying to conserve body heat under a blanket in an apartment with no heat. Maybe it was the fact that there was SUPPOSED to be heat that made it seem colder.

Outside the water that had so promisingly been melted from the snow that lay on the ground this morning had refrozen into thick sheets of black ice, reducing movement speed by about half and increasing bust-your-ass likelihood by a factor of 4. I began the night thinking that I was going to go home after stopping by to offer a few words of encouragement after a day that kept piggybacking upon itself, and ended up making up reasons for most of the night not to leave.

And as we huddled to keep warm and my friend began to succumb to the powerful pull of sleep, I found myself more in tune with the world than I had been all day. It was almost completely silent, save for the increasing volume of his increasingly labored breathing, a sure sign that he had already fallen asleep. As his muscles relaxed, periodically twitching, I was suddenly aware that this was the first time in a very long time that I had watched someone fall asleep, and was struck by how human it made me feel, and how strangely connected I felt with the universe and everyone in it.

The past several weeks have been marked by long periods without any sort of meaningful human interaction, leaving me feeling jaded and distanced from everyone I had grown so accustomed to connecting with. And in one night, in a matter of a few hours, I explained a tattoo, identified the impact I want to have on the world, I reconnected with an old childhood favorite dinner spot, I cuddled to keep warm on a couch, and I watched as a living, breathing person fell asleep next to me on a couch.

And I suddenly feel very warm. And pleasantly surrounded.