distraught, nervous, and very harassed Shane Lowe, I couldn’t do much to hold up our story. She saw through it from at least the second sentence. I admired her unwavering self-confidence, and wanted to know her better.

Madelyn is confident, determined, and doesn’t take a lot of BS. She could tell you sixteen ways you’re wrong about something, but she’ll turn around and defend you to an outsider because she’s loyal. I admire Madelyn, and fell in love with her because of her personality, the way she thinks, and the way she communicates. Sometimes she’s serious, but I’m jokey and relaxed. She wants things to be a certain way and executed precisely, and I’m more chill, I just see what happens. We balance each other out. She’s also beautiful.

Sighted people think that blind folk go around feeling everybody’s faces, which is crazy and kind of hysterical. Sometimes I’ll joke around and tell someone, “ Yeah I was just out yesterday, met a couple new people and felt up their faces.” It’s a joke because it’s really weird to just feel up somebody’s face. We don’t do that. I don’t even know what my family physically looks like. But when we’re more intimately close to someone, we will touch their face much as a sighted person would, and through that we know what they look like. Looks don’t matter to us, but through that we learn something knew about the person. The first thing a sighted person knows about someone is what they physically look like. For a blind person it’s the reverse.  It’s the last thing. The last step. It’s hard to put into words what Madelyn looks like. I know that she has a perfect face, though.

[Section break]

Four years after my prank call, a very different phone conversation occurred, again with Maddy on the line. We were both at our homes for the weekend, and it was somewhere after one in the morning. I'd just finished listening to an epic Bon Jovi concert on my laptop, while she had just finished a musical. I was exhausted, and staggered toward my bed. Maddy said “ I love you; sleep well,”  and I fell asleep,

[[Adolescent Shane with a walkie-talkie radio]