I met him two weeks after my eighteenth birthday.

At the time I worked three afternoons a week at a small art house cinema in St. Louis, a forty minute drive from our house. I called it work, but really it was more a way to be gone. I tore tickets, swept aisles, filled the popcorn machine, collected forgotten jackets and cold cups from the armrests. I liked it there. It was dark, no one asked me much, and every night I watched people walk in and come out a little changed. That felt almost magical to me.