The window we were sitting at was open because it was seventy-four degrees in November, which is Austin.

And at about eight-forty, over the traffic, I heard four lines.

Don’t count it tonight, don’t count it tonight,
the numbers’ll still be there in the morning.
Put your feet on the dash, put your head on my arm —
we’re the richest two people on this road.

I want to describe what happens in a body when that occurs, because I have never been able to do it properly.

It is not recognition.

Recognition is a thought.

This was underneath thinking.

My hands went cold and I was standing up before I had understood why I was standing up, and I heard my mother say my name, and I went out through the restaurant and out the door onto the sidewalk in about nine seconds.

Because I wrote those four lines.

I wrote them in a one-bedroom apartment on the east side of San Antonio in 2010, on the back of a fuel log, at about one in the morning, to make my wife stop crying about a spreadsheet.