The first time I met him, I was nineteen; he was fifteen.

I remember thinking he was grown for his age, or at least more developed than most boys are at fifteen. He seemed larger too; more human; more… whole, somehow.

Now I can only conclude it wasn’t he who was over-developed or ahead, but we who were behind. And greatly so, even for all our labor otherwise.

I remember being struck by the clearness in his eyes. They were big and round, and they sparked with clarity. The white was so crisp. The blue, so blue. He looked to be on a high-definition screen, distortion-less, but he wasn’t. He stood right in front of me, twinkling with that effortless clarity.

“Hello,” he said, easily.

His voice was deep and calm. It held no urgency in it – made no effort to be anything but what it was.

I looked around, thinking he must be speaking to someone else, but no one was there but me.

He smiled assuredly and pointed a hand toward me, identifying me as the recipient of his greeting.

“You,” he said, “hello to you.”

I gestured toward myself awkwardly, unsure of how to receive communication that was so pointedly for me. I wanted to lift my eyes to his, but it was difficult to maintain contact that was so direct, so I flittered my gaze from the green growth on the ground up to the blue in his eyes.

Green, blue. Green, blue. Green, blue.

It was a vibrant dance – a foreign one, too. 

He nodded at my unspoken question, affirming me again, smiling the whole while.

“Yes, you,” he said, “hello.”

I gripped my ALL-THINGS DEVICE and held it with two hands. I hoped it would ding and grant me the excuse to disengage. He was so raw – so unabashed – and something about it made me uncomfortable enough to want to leave, but I didn’t.

I remained. Right there in front of him. Clutching my ALL-THINGS DEVICE like it could somehow help me.

He smiled again and raised a confident grin that felt like it could be meant to mock me, but it wasn’t mocking me. Something in his face told me so.

After another moment of silence, he shook his head and pushed a hand toward me.

“I’m Mo,” he said.

His hand was dirty, colored darkest around the creases in his fingers and the beds of his fingernails, and I hesitated to touch it, but it seemed like the thing to do.

He had extended a hand out toward me and he seemed to desire me to meet him there, in the space between us, by returning the extension of his hand with one of mine.

I shifted my ALL-THINGS DEVICE to my right hand and used my left index finger and thumb to loosely grip two of his dirtied fingers. I pinched them lightly and held still, unsure of what to do next.

He laughed. The purest sound I’d ever heard.

It wasn’t his voice, or the tone, or the raucous chuckle that made it so alluring. No. It was the freedom of it. The feral nature of his release. It was wild; abandoned in a way I’d only ever seen or heard through the screen of my ALL-THINGS DEVICE.

It was if he knew the free air needed his laughter to fill it, and it did. It completed it, somehow.

“You’re from below the Watershed,” he said through spurts of his quieting laughter.

“Is-,” I stuttered. “Isn’t everyone?”

He lifted one side of his mouth into a half smile, dimpling that side of his face. His hair was streaked with light shades of brown and darker shades of yellow, like someone had painted it with a digital brush. Strands of its yellow fell across his crystal blue eyes when he looked at me.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked him, annoyed by the confidence that dressed him so easily.

He pinched an eye at me.

“What are you doing out here?” he returned. 

It wasn’t his odd physicality that kept me standing there, darting my eyes back and forth from the ground to his. It was his confidence – his comfort. Not just in his body, but in his surroundings. His environment. In the world. It was as if, even at his youthful age, he knew his place in the world; and it knew its place with him. I envied it – envied him. He was confounding and appealing. Annoying and pleasing. And he was waiting for an answer; but so was I.

“I think-,” I heard my voice trail off as I looked back at the way I’d come. 

“You’re lost,” he stated for me.

When he spoke, I noticed his face center itself on me, as though I was the only thing to see in that moment. It felt warm, but overwhelming. His focus on me, so real and touchable, drove heat into my ears almost instantaneously.

I let my gaze fall back to the ground while I fought my firing nerve-endings.

“Yes,” I murmured, “I- I think I’m lost.”

I compulsively turned my ALL-THINGS DEVICE face-up like I’d received an alert, but I hadn’t.

I swiped a few apps open like I was doing something. I wasn’t.

I looked from my ALL-THINGS DEVICE to him and then back again and stammered.

“I… I think… I have to go,” I blurted.

He smiled while I backed up. I was still unable to look away, yet unable to maintain contact.

Why was it so easy to look into someone’s face through the screen of my ALL-THINGS DEVICE? What made this interaction so disconcerting?

Why was he so steady? So poised? What held his back so straight and set his chin so sure like that? He was a child by every definition of the word, and yet, no child at all. It was as if he communicated with people like this regularly. Like he was used to looking at them as they were, without a filter or rightly planned lighting. Without staging or the time to consider one’s thoughts before taking a video or typing them into a well-suited caption.

His ease in real time made me feel… behind.

I stumbled over the growth at my feet, unsure how to navigate the return to my home below the Watershed. I’d left only to meet the Movement requirement, but I’d wandered. My eyes must have been on the Feed. The steady stream into my ALL-THINGS DEVICE must have kept my thumb pushing and somehow I’d ended up here, so far beyond the Watershed, lost in front of the clear-eyed Mo. Obnoxiously assured and artfully manufactured in a most unmanufactured way.

If only I had known how knowing what was beyond the Watershed would change things…

If only I had known how knowing him would change things….

I may have never returned.

Or perhaps… I never would have left at all.   

——-

But I did leave.

I left the world beyond the Watershed and returned to my life below it.

Where my followers interacted with my posts and my Cube was fit with rightly-lit filters and I regularly earned each day’s Achievement Rings. Everything that was expected or hoped for by a citizen below the Watershed was met.

By every measure, I should have been well.

But I found myself unusually restless.

Of course, I was accustomed to restlessness, as most of us were. It was common among us. I was accustomed to the low hum of anxiety and the occasional overwhelm of it. But there were Easements for that if I chose them – and many among us did.

Sometimes Movement could help manage the restlessness, so I moved a lot during that first week back. But if it helped, it was slight and at that – fleeting.

The low hum just kept humming. Kept refusing to let my essence settle. Refusing me the contentment – the okay-ness – for which I longed. My system kept nagging, kept pecking at me, demanding an answer I didn’t know how to give it.

I tried distracting myself with the Feed. I tried earning double the amount of Achievement Rings required. I tried sending the recommended beta waves through my Cube, but it didn’t work, so I changed my Cube’s wall scenery to something that looked like what I’d seen beyond the Watershed.

But it wasn’t the same.

It didn’t have that same wilding thing to it. The sounds were too high-pitched, too rhythmic. The greens were too green, or a different green, or a green with too much yellow in it. The flowers were too finely placed, the rustle of the leaves too much, and at the same time, not enough. It was as if they wanted to know what I knew, but they didn’t, and try as I might, I couldn’t explain it to them.

No matter what I did with the settings it wasn’t the same. My Cube could not hold life the way it did beyond the Watershed and there didn’t seem to be any way for me to tell it how to.  

Again, I considered putting in a request for an Easement, but I didn’t. I used to relish it – the escape, the ease of it, but now I didn’t want it. I knew what it would do.

I would take it and it would calm me. And depending on what Easement I chose, it may even numb me for a time. All my wonderings would stop wondering and my hesitancies would cease with their hesitancy. My questions would stop asking and my thoughts would stop thinking and I would float into okay-ness where nothing hurries, nothing hurts, nothing grieves… and nothing lives.

I didn’t want the fog of okay-ness. I wanted the clarity of Mo’s eyes and the sparks that flew from them.

I wanted more of that wholly unsettling feeling I’d had standing in front of him. I wanted the discomfort of knowing he could see me, even while unfiltered, unedited, and unscripted.

My ALL-THINGS DEVICE dinged.

“Achieved.”

It flashed red and white and winked approval at me for accomplishing my designated Movement for the day – an achievement that used to bring satisfaction. Where had that gone?

Where did satisfaction go when it was no longer satisfying? Where could one find it once lost? In a different endeavor? A different lover? A higher Cube class? A different day’s tasks? Why, since returning to my home below the Watershed, was I so very, very… empty?

———

I wasn’t familiar with the way beyond the Watershed, so when I went looking several weeks later, it took me more than one try to find it.

I worked my way back over the concrete paths. Back past where the Cubes were built. Back behind the Medical Point and over the short, green plastic grass that bordered the furthest edges of the world below the Watershed, and eventually, I found my way back to where I’d met Mo.

I approached cautiously, hoping to see Mo before he saw me. Now, looking back, I don’t know why I thought that possible.

I tripped over a root and groaned as my ALL-THINGS DEVICE went flying.

My knees hit the dirt with a thud.

“Uff,” I said involuntarily.

Mo laughed that unrestrained laugh of his. He was there, cross-legged in the dirt, picking at the leaves of a bush.

He chuckled while I brushed dirt from my knees. I thought about retrieving my device, but it was too near him. Without a visible Medical Clearance tag, I couldn’t know he was clean. I’d already touched him once and scrubbed myself raw at the thought of it. I couldn’t risk it again… could I?

He glanced over in time to see me hesitate. I looked at my ALL-THINGS DEVICE but didn’t speak.

He followed my gaze.

“You want that?” he asked, lifting his chin in the direction of my device.

I nodded.

He nodded back at me and then coolly resumed picking at the bush in front of him.

I was irritated at his cavalier response, but my aggravation was not enough to overcome my curiosity. He picked at the bush, dropped something into a basket that lay on the ground in front of him, and did it again, seemingly mindlessly, like he’d done it a thousand times before. 

“What –, “. I struggled to communicate with him directly, but I wanted to know. “What are you doing?” I asked.  

Mo didn’t look at me, but he did answer.

“Gathering blackberries,” he said.  

Blackberries?

Below the Watershed, we were served berries in a small, brown, cube-shaped container. They were wrapped in clear, stretchy plastic and served slightly chilled.

I took a step closer.

Just close enough to peer into the basket.

The berries were dusted with dirt, and a few stray leaves lay mingled among them.  I pinched my lower lip with my index finger and thumb.

“Ours come in a…, “. I shaped my fingers into a square. “…a box.”

Mo shook his head.

“Yours come from bushes too – just like this one.”

He turned and lifted one up for me to take.

“See?” Mo scooted his basket over under another bush and resumed picking. “Same thing.”

I examined the berry. It did look the same. Same bumps. Same oblong shape. This looked a bit smaller than what I was used to, but it was in fact, the same. I’d never seen them on a bush – or never seen them plucked off a bush, for that matter.

I wanted to verify what he’d said with my ALL-THINGS DEVICE, but it was still on the ground near him. I was disturbed that I couldn’t look it up myself and even more disturbed that my ALL-THINGS DEVICE was so far from me, just lying there on the ground near his leg. And Mo just kept picking away, humming a pleasant-sounding tune to himself, unbothered by the whole situation.

I grew irritated again but couldn’t help watching.

He paused, examined the bush he was working on, and scooted under another to begin anew.

It wasn’t until he moved that my eyes did as well, and for the first time since returning to the world beyond the Watershed, I saw.

Mo sat at the edge of a group of twenty or thirty blackberry bushes that grew almost as tall as he did. Large, leafy trees painted the backdrop, and the sun fell to where Mo worked, brightening the world on a brilliant patch of earth like it was made for that one place alone. And among the bushes, scattered every five or six bushes back, were others – other people. Other people who lived beyond the Watershed. They were picking berries too, among the wildflowers that decorated the verdant undergrowth.  

I hesitated to move for fear of disturbing the picture before me. It felt delicate. The realness of it seemed like a responsibility I was unfit to bear and unable, really, to know.

Mo shot a look my way and tossed an empty basket under a nearby bush with nothing but a swipe across his forehead and a tip of his chin toward the bush.

It took me a moment to understand his meaning, but after looking back and forth between he and the people and the bushes, I realized his invitation, and upon realizing it, I took it up.

———

It took months of visiting the world beyond the Watershed before I came to realize it wasn’t the clarity in Mo I had envied the day I met him. It was his awake-ness.

He experienced each moment as if it were the singular moment for which he was made. What made him extraordinary was the way he cherished the very, very ordinary.

The careful admiration of the wildflower.

The feeding of a baby, miraculous.

Every feeling of refreshment from a wash in a cool, slow bending river.

The purposeful tilling of the dirt for planting, rife with intention. 

And yes, even the mundane pick of the berry from the bush.

Every Movement had purpose. Every Movement was for the community. For essentiality or for nurture or for the betterment of the people who lived beyond the Watershed.  

Nothing was tracked but everything mattered.

Nothing was captured but everything seemed – somehow – priceless.

Even without the audience held within the ALL-THINGS DEVICE, Mo was filled. Complete. Content. Without a view, comment, or share. He, and the others beyond the Watershed, experienced extraordinary delight in the utterly common.

They were awake. They were undistracted.

And it was a very ordinary day, a very ordinary one indeed, on which I found myself that day, now years and years ago.

I stood in the cool, slow-bending river and listened to it run.

I’d rolled my pants up to my knees before wading in. The cool flow pushed gently against me and climbed most of the way up my calves. I’d found a few large rocks, just as Mo taught me, and bent myself right up into their shadows.  

I waited.

That, itself, was a feat of its own. It’d taken me weeks to have the patience to wait the way he’d shown me.

At first, it’d felt pointless – fruitless to wait.

Bent over, hands draped in the water beyond where I could see them, uncomfortable and silly-looking, extended out into an awkward position of anticipation.

Between the shadows and the glare of the sun on the water, I couldn’t see anything. I had only one option – to trust the instructions I’d been given; to wait.

That first few weeks I’d been so annoyed by the task. So frustrated by the lack of success. So anxious to have something to show for my efforts.

“Just wait,” he’d said with a nod. “Trust me.”

I scowled.

Weeks I’d been waiting. Weeks I’d been trusting. And for weeks, I’d remained empty handed.

I felt my ALL-THINGS DEVICE vibrate in my pocket, but I didn’t move.

I’d learned that lesson already. First to turn off the sound, and then not to respond if it alerted. Any movement from me could spoil my efforts.

I had only to be still.

And it demanded so much more than I thought it would. It required my own command over me. It called for a mastery over my initial instincts and what I’d learned about how to live while living below the Watershed.

Be still.

I exhaled. Talked to myself. 

Don’t lose your progress.

Wait.

My ALL-THINGS DEVICE alerted again. 

Be still.

Be still.

And then, my hands filled.

Right into my open and waiting hands, a fish.

My eyes grew large and I swallowed a gasp. I looked quickly to Mo who sat nearby, grinning a knowing grin. One most assured. One that knew all along.

I gripped just enough to keep the fish in hand and straightened. With one swift and assertive motion, I tossed the fish into the waiting net.

Mo nodded approval.

Uncaptured and unviewed, and yet, as satisfied as I could remember being.

I smiled triumphantly at the water below and in that moment, a glimmer from below the surface caught my eye. 

At first, I thought it was the mere glint of sun off the sparkling water but at a more intimate inspection, I saw it.

My ALL-THINGS DEVICE.

Gone to rest on the rock at the bottom of the cool, slow-bending river.

A panic fought to clench my chest, but the tension that wanted to grip me fled at my exhale.

Was it… relief?

“Come,” Mo said, rising from the ground, unaware of my loss. He brushed off his hands and gathered the basket at his feet. “Let’s celebrate.”

I looked to Mo and then to my ALL-THINGS DEVICE, quietly dying under the water, at my feet. 

And I nodded.

”Yes,” I said. “Celebrate.” 

———

I don’t remember much from that evening other than the orange hue of the fire on their smiles.

The crooked, misplaced, unkempt, half-wrangled grins of those very awake Others. Perfect; altogether unlovely; unliked; uncaptured and uncapturable, if my true be really true. 

The next morning, I returned to the spot in the cool, slow bending river and I stood in the shadow of the rocks and looked for My ALL-THINGS DEVICE.

It was gone.

And I knew – and I know – it could be replaced.

Easily. 

And all I would have to do, is return to the place below the Watershed. 

But, you know, it’s funny… I haven’t. I haven’t returned. 

And I don’t know that I ever will.