Mouth to Mouth

He took off his shoes and socks, then stepped barefoot onto the cold sand, feeling a sense of liberation at his own insignificance, while also feeling—because he was alone, because it was dark, because the entire city lay behind him, asleep—a sense of himself as a sort of local god, surveying his domain under a cloak of invisibility and omnipotence, two sides of the same coin.

Plus he’d put on weight, become more solid in the way so many of us did after college, continuing to grow into manhood long after we thought we’d arrived.