The two apartment complexes were bridged by a vast gulf of green lawn that mirrored the surrounding fields in its vacancy. When you’re that far out of the city, in eminent nature, away from the glittering captivity of towering architecture, the illusion of civilization begins to fade. The roads were deep scars in the hillside and the occasional jutting buildings appeared alien and tumorous. There was a party. I was moving back home in less than a week. I’d gotten up early. I’d just quit my job. Most of the people there had been my coworkers. We crossed the verdant no-man’s land in front of Richard Pain’s apartment (the party’s center-point) to claim a small paved square. There were picnic tables and a little charcoal grill which Pain fired and loaded up with hot dogs and hamburgers–as no good party is complete without a BBQ. I heard someone I didn’t know say, “Feel these plants, it feels like they’re buzzing.” I knelt to touch a leaf on one of the low shrubs bordering the square and felt vibration as I drew my thumb across the surface. “Huh,” I said. Later, inside, while watching Superbad, panic rose in my throat and I went out onto the balcony so I could at least die with fresh air in my lungs. Someone who I had worked with came out and talked to me. I wondered if that was friendship. When it was dark I was out on the square again, where the person who first felt the vibrating shrubs was sitting apart with his head in his hands. He handed me a drink, and when my fingers touched his, I felt them buzzing, just like the plants surrounding us had.