“I can resist everything except temptation”, Oscar Wilde once said, and in my eyes that elevated him into the greatest writer to have ever lived; I also recall another quote of his that went something along the lines of, “I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.” I’ve always admired his wisdom, but to be honest I never quite knew what he really meant until recently. I mean, of course I understood it in the theoretical sense, I just never could relate.

It was a Thursday night like any other when I met him, except maybe it wasn’t. I had just come into my regular bar, Breakers, from a dinner with my lover Erica. It felt to her like we were always there, seeing the same faces, having the same conversations, and she was completely right. But she came with me anyways; she always does.

Even during our relationships’ longest argumentative stage, she travelled all the way from her side of town to Breakers just to sit there in the hopes that I might be there; I never did show up that night, but I heard stories of her long wait. She’s very sentimental like that, always doing things for me that go against her better judgement.

Back to this boy I met, his name was Don, a 27-year-old self-proclaimed visual artist and painter. Erica didn’t take much of a liking to him, she hardly paid him any mind, but as for me, I couldn’t help but notice him. I don’t have much to say about my initial introduction to him except for this: maybe I should’ve worn that olive green striped vest that accentuates my upper body, instead of my unflattering, oversized black hoodie. But I digress; I was completely overwhelmed by Don’s presence.

Although he was drunk and made sly comments about my romantic relationship with Erica, I felt deeply for him, surprisingly. It was almost as if I had met somebody I should’ve met three years ago, a soul mate of some sort. And I don’t mean that in that shallow Hollywood romantic comedy sense, but rather in the delicate, basic yet all-embracing and meaningful way, almost like falling in love with your own brother, where you’re aware of your feelings, but equally aware of the impracticability of the relationship. We spoke casually that night about everything and nothing all at once, topics ranging from Elijah Mohammed, Kanye West, the Black Panther movie and the difference between religion and spirituality. I even laughed at his distasteful jokes about homosexuality and a possible threesome between him, Erica and I. By the end of that night, I felt a sense of relief and disbelief at having met, for the first time in an unholy place like Breakers, a drunken boy with a soul.

I saw Don every second day for the following two weeks. We wouldn’t do very much except spoon, drink and smoke; which by then had become our holy trinity. His apartment, or “The Cave”, as he liked to call it, was curiously empty except for a bed, a guitar and a few scattered around paints and brushes for his artwork. Notably though, when I would crawl into his bed, I always felt oddly meditative and whole; it was an extraordinary feeling for me. It seemed once we were there together, our basic animal instincts to do nothing but mate, eat and sleep, kicked us both heavily. It was no surprise to me then to realise that by the end of the fortnight I had completely deserted all that I knew to be my normal routine, and this included my time with Erica, or lack thereof.

Tell us: Have you ever met someone you connected with like that?