This is the first installment of a three-part series.

And to make matters worse, it was one of those midnight Megabuses. The kind where you arrive at Union Station just as the sun’s coming up and find yourself trying to kill an hour and a half before the El starts running. It’s the kind where Indiana becomes so pitch black along the way that you feel like you’re in outer space. Most people sleep. And it’s convenient (the sleeping), but it makes the blackness all the more arresting if you should happen to wake up — haunting, even, if the wind is loud enough.

People assume that if you take a midnight bus, it somehow counts as having slept. (Are they out of their minds?) As if sleeping in a bed and sleeping on a bus-seat are even remotely equivalent. We were nearing Toledo, about two hours and fifteen minutes from Cleveland’s Tower City, and at that point not only hadn’t I slept. I’m fairly certain I hadn’t blinked.

There were four reasons why:

1) Probably the guiltiest party: I indulged in two enormous cups of coffee between 9:30 and 11:30. I was watching a movie with two of my brothers before I left, and it was on — the coffee. Seemed silly to waste.

2) At once the most futile and most cosmic: I couldn’t get Diana (whom you haven’t met) off my mind. And now, the traitorous idea that I was somehow abandoning her. It made me feel yanked at. And I knew the fitful, sort of armpit-sweaty unease I felt wouldn’t stop until she returned my text or phone call, (and this was becoming more and more unlikely, at quarter to two).

I was able to recognize, at least, how kooky the whole thing seemed, this “danger.” It wasn’t a physical danger, I didn’t think, more spiritual — seemed kind of hiccupped out of Lord of the Rings or the Matrix. Something like an imbalance. And I don’t know why all of a sudden I felt like her protector again. A selfish guardian, the more I thought about it, because all I wanted — and all I had ever wanted — was to preserve the image of her that I found so inviolate; not defend it. Embalm it, if anything.

3) Easily the most annoying: There was a dreadlocked man of really quite striking girth snoring in the most unpleasant manner imaginable about six seats up. It was a constant guttural snarl, where I could actually hear his phlegm reshuffling in his sinuses and lungs. It came from down deep. Up from the cavernous interior of his stomach. Or maybe even deeper — the embittered bundle of his loins.

The people who had been sitting closest to him had already retreated to the first level. And now, the nearest ones were (at least, thank God) far enough as to not be spit on by the projectiles exploding like shrapnel from his mouth. They were all trying to sleep, and were now debating quietly about whether or not to say something to him. An eager-looking fellow in a Dallas Cowboys hat was working the emotional angle.

– God damn. And I’ve got to work tomorrow too. Who’s going to work? Anybody?

It would be too embarrassing to confront him — that was clear. But it looked like maybe they were trying to talk loud enough to wake him up, just briefly, so he could reposition or something, and cut that nasty shit out.

4) The most pressing: There was a deranged-looking fellow licking his fingers and rubbing his hair — licking and rubbing, a cat’s shower — in the seat directly next to mine. He was wide awake, and at about 2:15 a.m. he developed a singular and rather boisterous interest in learning my first name.