This is a heavy conversation, but not as heavy as my eyelids. I'm going to go to sleep, and unfortunately leave you hanging, sitting out here on the porch, with the empties and the blooming ashtray and the scorched edges of a fragile intimacy. I know we're just coming to the big moment in your story, the assault that left you with such emotional scars and inability to trust, but the thing is I don't know that I can summon the appropriate quality of attention that such a moment deserves. And I know this conversation exists only tonight, right now, I know we can't simply pick it up another time, it doesn't work like that. The whatever it is that we've created, this tenuous zone of trust, a shared understanding that seems to pull information from us, exists only as long as the spell lasts. Why is that I wonder. People think they've forged a connection, that a permanent bridge has been erected, but it usually hasn't. Or it has but they later wish it hadn't. Usually the next time you see that person, in fact, the look you exchange is one of embarrassment. You think, I can't believe I told that person about my summer camp epiphany, how ridiculous, or the weird thing with my father, or the time I accidently spit on that UPS guy and with great self-control he refrained from even acknowledging the big splotch on his cheek right under his eye and I got so flustered and humiliated that I took it out on him and threw a pointless fit over nothing, rewarding his heroic good manners by grabbing his electronic clipboard thing and smashing it on the ground for absolutely no reason, and trying so hard to avoid having anything delivered by UPS after that.

Not to suggest that your story is anything like that, your story of profound personal devastation. And anyway that never happened.