Remember those quiet evenings.

The power went out in our house on the cliff in Santa Barbara. A tropical storm had been battering the coastline for the past couple of days, and finally, our section of the power grid went down. I remember thinking at the time that I wanted to have family time with my roommates. Two of them had fallen into relationships, and we had been seeing less and less of each other as the year had progressed.

Night fell, and we lit candles and sat around the living room talking and reading each other interesting facts from the reference books we had on our laps. Jacque Cousteau’s epitaph is “Jacque Cousteau has returned to the silence”. Reno, Nevada is further west than San Diego, California. I walked into the kitchen to get another bottle of wine, and when I turned, the flickering candlelight slipped in through the doorway, followed by my friends’ voices and laughter, and I felt happy.

Hours later, the two roommates with significant other left to spend the night elsewhere, leaving me and Brit to fend for ourselves. We ended up going downtown to the bars, looking for girls. A few hours later, we came back to a dark and empty house, drunk and alone.