"TAK!"

It's four cups of tea, six crepes and one liter of beer later. Neither of you have showered, and you can smell the rubber from the dance studio floor on your clothes. Your hair is greasy and for a moment his smoke cloud lingers, like a poof of cotton candy. The sunshine jived on the pieces all afternoon to tunes from the 1950's, but the moon doesn't seem to be as interested. Secretly, this pleases the lamp with the giraffe neck and he beams with importance.

The perfume of the countless antique pages from around the world fills the room with spiced, musky wisdom, which you blissfully allow to percolate into you. Concentration's silence is broken with each piece's cardboard sounding "TAK!", causing his lips to curl up and a joyful squeak to spring forth from your own. Fifteen hundred reasons to celebrate. You playfully roll your eyes at his comment, grinning despite yourself.

And at some point, the intense study of greens and browns is paused, and the fields and manes wait patiently to be further unified. He leaves the room physically and you leave the room mentally, reclining in the little bucket chair and putting your feet on the table next to one of their hooves - or is it part of the other's shadow? You slide to unlock, and what others so foolishly call "reality" grabs at you and tries to pull you under.

When you finally free yourself, you close your eyes and take a deep breath of relief to be back home. You couldn't have been gone for that long, yet when you look up, you find him sitting in the corner, eyes carefully masticating the tiniest of details. The graphite is in a tither, performing a spastic yet graceful tribal dance, and you can't tell if he is leading it or it's leading him. For a split second you wonder what all the strokes are crafting, but when you glance at him again, he is staring straight at you and your eyes become a bashful shade of green.

And this is your life now. Your picturesque, surreal life.

When he's finished, you ask him in Spanish if he believes in luck or in energy. With him here is no language barrier; there is no philosophical barrier. When he asks for an example of something lucky, scoffing slightly at the seeming absurdity of such a question, you connect two words with a "TAK!":

"Meeting you."

And his lips curl up.