Carbonation.

I like carbonation in my friends: out-on-a-limb idealism or a traveler’s itch, a shivery past or libertarian streak, with frostbite scars, perhaps, or a veteran’s fatalistic flinch when a car backfires. The “vibes” people speak of seem natural to me. When you intuit that somebody you hadn’t expected is approaching before they reach your door, or realize that a person, silent, elsewhere in the house, needs a hug, it’s not “extrasensory perception” but telepathy to antennae we haven’t pinpointed, a force field we haven’t quantified, which also warns us, when we’re hurrying down a city street, about unseen dangers around the corner: potential collisions, muggers, flimflammers, whatever.

We came to trust in the validity of telepathic promptings without wishing to peel back the anatomy of the riddle, as if that might possibly queer the deal. Whether primal or rife with innocence, like the smell of vanilla, or the formula of vernal sunshine that causes birds’ songs to intertwine, the randiness of a honky-tonk piano’s tinkle, a flying loon’s midsummer giggle—what is the rush to dissect the math or chemistry of every delight? Wordlessly jogged by a friend’s tangent of thought at the kitchen counter, our lips mouth the same change of topic. On a hunch, a premonition, by sniffing pheromones and distinguishing shifty eyes from shy ones and hearing no liars’-poker subsounds in the voice, employees, lovers, chums get picked.

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