Levon had been planning it since Wednesday. Not out loud, not written down anywhere — he's opposed to planning, philosophically — but you could see it building behind his eyes every time he checked the forecast on someone else's phone and then handed it back like he hadn't just seen exactly what he needed to see.
"Thunderstorms," he said Saturday afternoon, with the reverence most people reserve for solar eclipses. "Perfect."
The idea, as I understood it, was this: we would go to the boardwalk at dusk, no phones, just vibes and a pocket notebook and three pencils he'd borrowed from the Asbury Park library that still had the little metal bands on them with the branch code. We would find Lili — the new restaurant in the old Stella Marina space, which he'd heard about from someone at the laundromat — by, and I want to be precise here, "following the weather." He meant this poetically. He meant that the storm would create atmosphere, that we would wander by feel, that the evening would locate itself.
He was extremely proud of this. He had been reading about analog hobbies as an antidote to doomscrolling and had, in the way that Levon does things, decided to go about sixty percent further than the article suggested.
"It's a sensory reset," he told me on the walk to the boardwalk. "We're just present. We're just bodies in a place."
The wildfire haze was sitting on the horizon like a warning label. The air was 77 degrees and felt like the inside of someone's mouth. There was construction near the Paramount — scaffolding, equipment, a sign about Phase Two of the preservation project — and a Color & Light installation on the beachfront that was glowing pink and gold even before dark, which is a beautiful thing to see and also sort of undercut Levon's claim that we were escaping modern spectacle.
We had been on the boardwalk for approximately eleven minutes when the lightning started.
Not distant lightning. Not the polite, far-off kind that just adds drama. The kind that hits the water and makes the air smell like a car starting.
"We should probably —" I said.
"The notebook is water resistant," Levon said.
It is not. He knows this now.
We ran. Everyone on the boardwalk ran. A woman in a Second Sunday Sidewalk Sale tote lost her kettle corn. A man with a very elaborate shaved ice was briefly illuminated. Levon, to his credit, did not once suggest that we slow down and appreciate the moment, which I think showed real growth.
We ended up under the overhang of the new boardwalk restroom facility — which, I'll say this, is a genuinely good addition to the infrastructure, clean and well-lit — along with about fifteen strangers, two dogs, and a teenager who looked at Levon's soaked pocket notebook and said, "Is that from the library?"
"It's analog," Levon said, with some dignity.
We found Lili eventually. Not by following the weather — by asking a woman with an umbrella who knew exactly where it was and pointed us two blocks south. It was warm and loud and smelled like garlic and summer, and the windows were fogged from the rain, and it was genuinely lovely. Levon wrote the name of his dish in the wet notebook with a library pencil and the letters blurred out almost immediately and he looked at it for a long moment.
"I'll remember it," he said.
"You won't," I said.
"I'll remember the feeling of it."
And here's the thing. He probably will. Levon has an almost supernatural ability to retain the emotional texture of an evening while losing every practical detail — the name of the restaurant, the dish, the pencils, which he left on the table. What he keeps is the running, and the overhang, and the woman with the umbrella, and the foggy windows. He keeps the part where we arrived somewhere warm after something went wrong, and that version is, genuinely, not so bad.
I checked the flash flood alert on my phone under the table. He didn't ask what I was looking at.
Some compromises you make quietly, for love.