MADRID, Spain – On the far cusp of the night, I sit undressed on the edge of the bed drinking in the air that has finally cooled. You must wait until everyone has gone to sleep to receive the cool air with its messages from beneath the sea.

I chuckle at the audacity of this idea, given that I am in a bedroom bounded by the arid central plains of Spain with no ocean in sight, but my body shivers slightly at the thought: the ocean scares me: all that water, all that cold darkness, all that unthinking mass. It is so far away from the warm undulations of the woman’s body beside me that I so recently left: all that life, all that seething, all that need in one single being.

I do not belong anywhere else. I do not belong on mountaintops or beneath the sea. I belong right where I am, seated on the edge of a woman’s bed, sitting in silence, pleasantly curious about what comes next but in no hurry to get there.

I am complete at times like this. There is no more questing, no more struggling. At times like this I just know with every open pore of my body that the secret is here, the wisdom is here, the future and all its unanswered questions is here, hovering above this rumpled bed.

Other men have different destinies, but this is mine and I return to it over and over again in search of the wisdom that I am hungry for. I was in a hurry before, but now I realize that there is time and that each of us is given exactly enough time to do what he must do.

The woman beside me rolls over, but she is not waking, only adjusting her body to the geography of her dreams, reflected on her lips in a quiet smile.

In a few hours it will be morning, but I know that the discoveries of this night will permeate many days to come. The truths that are revealed in the darkest moments of the night are the ones we can never forget.