Sam Brown
rating: 0+x

"Could I get a caramel macchiato?"

"Sure thing," the cashier said. I, overhearing the interaction, was already grabbing the espresso shot cup and holding it up to the espresso machine.

"And could I have that with oatmilk?"

The cashier nodded. Shit, I thought, we have oat milk?

"And two muffins, please."

"What kind?"

"Plain," they said, like there was some kind of indignity to having to specify.

Plain muffins, I noted, looking around in the fridge for oat milk. Hey, what do you know, we do.

My coworker gave them the bill, and while they put their card into the chip reader, I put a dollop of milk on top of that macchiato. Nine parts espresso, one part milk, I reminded myself. But there was too much of a rush coming in for me to stop and actually measure shit. I eyeballed it, and definitely put in a little too much, maybe eight parts espresso two parts milk, but whatever, no one was going to care.

I presented it on the counter, along with a tiny plate of two muffins, and had the haughty flannel-wearing hipster not even give me eye contact when I was trying to put on a smile for the customer. I thought I saw him take a long look at the macchiato and winced, but there was no time.

"Hiii, could I have a cappuccino? Dry, and stir in a packet of sugar? Thank you!"

I did the mental equivalent of sneering. Those women, who always go up at the end of their sentences, like everything's a question, were so grating, and it felt like I heard that type of voice at least three times a day.

He asked if that was all, she said yes, gave her the bill, and I was already on it, frothing milk with the steam wand in the pitcher.

"Actually, did I say dry? I want it wet? Sorry for the mix-up!"

You fucker, I thought, and I even mouthed the words this time, but I kept my head down and just did my job, scraping some foam off the top of their drink and adding in some more milk. They won't notice, I said to myself again, sliding the drink onto the counter. That one was their fault anyways.

And as they were walking away, I remembered the sugar.

I rolled my eyes at myself, and my focus coasted towards the clock, which was four minutes from hailing my lunch break. And when I came back into reality, I saw that a friend of mine was just about to order.

"Hey, Sam!"

"Oh, yo Han." I scooted towards the register, bumping my coworker with my elbow just a little. "Hey Bo, let me take this one."

He nodded, and we switched positions, him on drinks and me on customers.

Vihaan gave me a big smile, with that one half-closed eye he always had. "The usual?" I asked.

"Of course," he said, "but does, uh, Bo know what that is?"

I shook my head, and said in Bo's direction: "Hot spicy chai latte, a little heavy on the milk, unsweetened."

Bo did a little salute and started paging through our teas.

"You've got a lunch break coming up, right?" Han asked, as he pulled out his card.

I tapped through the interface on the iPad to queue up his drink: "Yeah, I do."

"Great. I'll be sitting just outside, if you want to join me."

I looked up from the screen, and saw that hipster-looking guy standing back up from his seat after having taken a sip from his macchiato, and looking like he was about to come back over.

From there, my eyes went to the clock. Two more minutes until my lunch break, but…

"I'm taking my break right now, actually. Bo, you're on your own for a hot second, I'll tap Gloria to come back." Bo nodded while the transaction went through and Han removed his card.

"I gotta go drop off my apron for my break, meet you outside."

Han nodded, and took his drink that Bo had so speedily prepared from the counter.

I walked into the back room, hung up my apron, and saw Gloria sitting there on her phone, sipping at something I knew was too hot to drink without burning your tongue. I had to wonder how many taste buds she even still had left.

"Glo, your boyfriend needs help up front."

She raised eyebrows. "I still have two minutes."

"Yeah, sorry, taking my lunch break with a friend, just go up early for me? It's literally two minutes. I'd do the same for you."

She shook her head, but stood up. "Fine," she said, putting her phone in her little locker and walking over to the aprons.

Nice, I thought, walking out the door, and then walking out from behind the counter, through the café, and out the door into the hot, dry air of Phoenix, Arizona.

Vihaan was sitting at a table alone, right next to the fence that separated the café from the big parking lot it was connected to. For being such a nice place, the view out into a big lot of asphalt wasn't particularly alluring, but I guess they also hired pieces like me, so it wasn't all that prestigious. I guess the couple of big buildings visible from inside were kind of scenic, as far as Phoenix can be scenic at all. Honestly, it just didn't feel like a café kind of city.

But there we were. The Coffee Beetle, a café in the middle of a parking lot in the middle of a city in the middle of a desert. I guess there was a place for little caffeine-retreats anywhere you went, and bougie asshats existed everywhere so it wasn't like that was an issue.

So I sat down, and did actually appreciate the bit of shade the umbrella provided. No clue why Han hadn't taken the shaded side. Maybe his brown skin made him immune to the sun or something.

"Hey," I started. "Crazy that people still get hot drinks, huh?"

Han raised eyebrows, and finished a sip he was taking. "I get hot drinks."

"Yeah, well, maybe you're a little crazy, is what I'm saying."

He chuckled. "Good to see you too, man."

I smiled, just a little, hunched over the table like I was about to give him some really vital information, but I didn't have any, I just sat that way because my back was hurting for some reason. I'd guess it was standing so long, but that wasn't an issue back when I worked at the warehouse, and that was a lot more standing and lifting than this.

"So, how are you?" I prompted, wanting to take the onus off of myself to uphold the conversation.

"Oh, you know. Same as always. Busy, but happy with it. The gallery just opened, which is why I haven't been so available as usual."

"No prob," I responded.

"Thanks. Yeah, the website turned out really well, I'm pretty thrilled with it actually. It's gonna be a great thing to put on a resumé, you know?"

"Yeah, yeah."

He took another sip of his drink. His fuzzy, short black hair was matted down by a little brown hat he wore. I forgot the name of the style, but it looked really good on him. Not a fedora. That's the only hat name I knew, 'cause it was a meme or something. It was one of those fancy hats that had the duckbill on the front but wasn't a baseball cap.

I hadn't seen it before, but I didn't ask him about it. Asking Han about new clothes was like asking about the jock's new girlfriend. Did you really care enough to keep up? No. You're never gonna see her again anyways, so drop it.

"They're offering me a permanent position after my role as web designer is used up."

"Oh really?"

"Yeah, they want to keep me as a curator."

I raised eyebrows. "Curator?"

He took a sip. "Yeah."

"Fuck is that?"

Han laughed. "It's a, uh, you organize the artwork however the gallery wants you to organize it, keep it prim and proper, kind of be a janitor, but, like, for the important stuff. You don't mop the floors, you, like, dust artwork and shit."

"Sounds kind of boring."

Han shrugged. "You get to learn all about the art and everything. The pay's good too."

He took a sip. A silence endured.

"And…?"

Han smiled and shrugged. "I don't know. Doesn't feel like me."

A corner of my mouth curled up, but I fought it. "Alright," was all I said.

"Yeah." He took a longer swig, really getting a mouthful of that latte for some reason, skin still sitting directly in the searing sun, wet with perspiration. When he was done, he took a deep, satisfied breath, like he hadn't just cooked his head from the inside-out.

"So," he started, "what about you?"

I scratched the back of my head again, and went from hunched to leaning all the way back in my seat, arms behind my head, face towards the sky, so bright it was hard to look at.

And then I shrugged. "Same as always."




The door shut behind me, its huff, muffled by the carpet, ushering me into my room. My apartment. My place.

I turned on the lamp, but just the lamp, and kept the curtains closed, to pour shadow over the bed, TV, and couch. I first went for my closet, and changed out of my barista uniform. Nothing special: I donned jeans and a tee. Then, I went to the bathroom, flicked on the light, splashed water into my face, dried it off with a towel, laid bubblegum toothpaste onto my toothbrush, brushed my teeth, picked up my cinnamon-flavored floss, flossed my teeth, licked my teeth without thinking because I had always done that after cleaning my teeth every day of my life since I could remember, and then walked back out, grabbed the remote off the nightstand, fell into bed, and turned on the television.

There's nothing wrong with the television. Perfectly good TV. Just like there's nothing wrong with my teeth. Lick 'em clean, perfectly clean teeth. I liked my lamp too, even though I turned it off to sit in the pure, sizzling glow of the screen. I was on some channel, some big channel that has everything on it, and I was letting it play what it wanted to play, whatever it was scheduled to play at 8:30 at night on a Tuesday.

I guess that was an undercover boss show. I wasn't sure if there was just one or if there were multiple, but it felt like I saw it everywhere. A real craze. Craze for what? Putting on a fake mustache and pretending to be someone else? What a joke.

It looked like this time, it was some big delivery business. Boss guy, he walked into a big warehouse, met a guy on a forklift, struck up a conversation.

And that guy, the guy in the forklift, he looked a lot like me.

Five, six years ago, I was a forklift driver, in some big warehouse in Phoenix, for some big company I couldn't give two shits about. I'd pick up these big boxes, full of cups, plates, antiques, toothbrushes, wrenches, just anything you could possibly think of, and I'd haul them onto the truck after bringing them over with the forklift. That was the job. The place was huge, it was cold, it was monotonous, and the pay was terrible.

But hey, I didn't hate my coworkers. By some stroke of luck, not everyone there had a gun next to their bedside table they were just waiting for a reason to use, and one of those safe, stable people was Vihaan. Vihaan Kumer.

We saddled up with each other soon after realizing our schedules were essentially the same. He was funny. He thought I was funny. And we both had to find a way to weather the brain-numbing work, so we saddled up.

We drank beers together after work until he stopped finally stopped politely enduring it, and just told me straight up he wasn't a drinker. Then we went to cafes, and I guess I never politely endured it, but I never offered an alternative.

One day, Han told me he was going places. The warehouse wasn't his place anymore. I told him if he's quitting, so am I, because he was the only thing that got me through to the end of the day.

His job search took two weeks.

Mine took a year and a half.




Traffic was surprisingly nice to me, so I had some minutes to just sit in my car in the parking lot outside the Coffee Beetle. Of course, I wasn't doing anything with my time. I'd actually just downloaded the Reddit app on my phone, just 'cause it was better for surfing the porn subreddits I frequented. No other reason. But just as a result, when I found I had nothing to do, I'd sometimes start scrolling the home page for no reason. Story after story, tragedy after tragedy, sprinkled with memes that sometimes referenced things I didn't even know about. Like, what's this Formula One? It keeps popping up and I have no idea.

But I looked at the clock in my car, and it's 6:21 pm. The thing's seven minutes slow, so that's my cue to walk in. I take a swig of my water bottle, pocket my phone, step out of the vehicle, close the door, and lock the whole thing. I was already in uniform — brown and black because they're just so fucking creative I guess — and I looked like I should be smoking but I dropped the habit a year or two ago when I was tired of people giving me shit about it. I guess I started doing it 'cause my friends in high school did, but I stopped talking to them and it smelled awful, so.

Anyways, I walked up the short steps onto the patio, and then pushed through the door, and was greeted by the evening lighting of the Coffee Beetle. See, they liked to keep it a little dim when the natural light went down. Almost a night-club vibe. You got more personal little lamps at the desks, and some people sat at stools on the sidelines, by the windows, with no light but their computers. Even I'll admit it, it was kind of cool. And adding to the night-club vibe, this was also usually when we had live music.

So I wasn't surprised when, on opening the door, my ears were greeted by an acoustic guitar. Something soft, classical sounding. I knew the sound of classical guitar because my dad used to play it to make me shut up as a baby. I knew jackshit about anything "classical" otherwise.

But I brushed by it. Tunnel-vision, I went straight to the backroom and hung my jacket on a coat. I was putting on my apron, when the guitarist must have started singing. The vocal tones, kind of high but definitely a man's voice, carried through into the employee area, too muffled to hear what they were, but… they were familiar.

My tying the apron behind my back slowed as I tried to place where I knew it from, and then sped up as I realized I'd get an edge on figuring it out the quicker I stepped out. So I finished, entered the kitchen, and from behind the counter, I saw him. In the center of the tiny, raised stage, illuminated by a very concentrated spotlight, Vihaan was doing this fingerpicking thing, this floating-across-the-strings thing I'd never seen him do. With no orders yet, and little cleaning to do, I just leaned over the counter, and watched.

He scrunched up close to the mic and he sang:


"And the water from the woods
Was eighty miles long
And the fire from the lightning
As hot as it was strong
In the canyon, past the crook there
Is a hollow made of sky
Where I hide, all the night, shaking like a frightened dog
Where I died, golden bright in the morning fog"


He was mixing some folksy tune with that crazy fingerpicking of his. I guess I should say I'd never heard anything like it, but really I wasn't one to know if it was a genre already or not. It just looked… impressive. And I stood there, behind the counter, not really noticing just how much I was leaning over it, looking at my friend Vihaan, who had the eyes of a tiny crowd taking a break from whatever work they had to do at 6:30 on a Friday. Just watching him. Vihaan with his guitar.

"Damn good, huh?" The low voice of my manager nearly startled me out of my skin, so I turned around and gave him a look. He just chuckled, very breathy as he was trying to keep it down, and repeated himself, a statement this time: "Damn good. Hey, that's your friend, right?"

I shrugged, but said: "Yeah. Han."

"And you knew he played like that and didn't tell me?" He didn't give me space to answer. "Well, he's killing the open mic. Maybe go ask him if he can come back sometime. Something scheduled, y'know?" There was a pause, as he and I returned to looking at Han, picking steel strings, showing off some kind of secret dexterity you'd never know was there watching him lift big boxes at the warehouse.

"Damn good," my manager repeated himself.

I sighed. And nodded. 'Cause he was. Fuck, he was good.




The door shut behind me, its huff, muffled by the carpet, ushering me into my room. My apartment. My place.

I turned on the lamp and kept the curtains closed. I changed out of my barista uniform: donned jeans and a tee. Then I went to the bathroom, washed my face, brushed my teeth, flossed my teeth, and licked my teeth without thinking because I had always done that after cleaning my teeth every day of my life since I could remember, walked back out, grabbed the remote, fell into bed, and turned on the television.

Nightly ritual. TV watching. I was plugged into one of those channels that had everything on it, because that's the kind of stuff I liked. A little bit of everything. I wanted to be surprised. Except TV was never surprising. I guess I didn't want to be surprised, I just didn't want to be bored. I was already so bored at work, I figured I might as well have some refuge of interesting shit at home.

Home. Not quite the word. My place. My apartment. My room. My bed, couch, television, bathroom, and clothes. But it wasn't really my home. I just slept there.

Slept and watched TV. That day, it was some sort of TV psychic. People in the crowd getting all teary eyed over some guy telling them that their dead cousin says hi or someshit. Blew chunks. You think I never tried to lift pencils with my mind? Well I did. To be clear, if you get your kid a book for Christmas that's all about how to train yourself to read minds and tell the future, don't be so fucking surprised when you get an angry crying kid who put two and two together when his crush rejected him with a punch in the face. Yeah, guess what? Crystal ball was wrong. I was just as single at twenty-three as I was at ten.

Han always had the weirdest takes on this kind of stuff, but he was always so vague about it. Something about unlocking your mind, and breathing positivity, and, like, actualizing. He loved to use the word actualize. It was like his favorite word. Whenever I was being cynical about something he'd just smile and shrug and start talking about how you can't know, how he believes unexplainable phenomena happen and you learn to, I dunno. Feel the magic of the world.

I was too nice. I never told him to his face I thought it was horseshit. I mean, he could tell, right, obviously I never bit, but I never said it to his face and I think that's why he kept bringing it up.

Y'know what? Maybe he's right! It certainly seems like Han tended to actualize a lot. Actualize a job, actualize career opportunities, actualize enough money to change your wardrobe each week. Maybe every night he sat in his bed and sat cross-legged with those little pinchy hands on his knees and lifted pencils with his mind.

And then, I dunno, picked up a guitar and started strumming.

Man, he never told me he played guitar. Guess he was supposed to surprise me at work. But I'd asked him if he played an instrument once, and he said no. Shit, I played guitar. Senior year, I was one of those guys who thought he was so cool, carrying around this big heavy case and whipping out a guitar every once in a while, playing the riffs everyone knew, like that one from Smoke on the Water, or the beginning of Stairway to Heaven. Was practicing for years before I had the confidence to bring it out.

Han, on the other hand.

Oh, the other hand.

Then the TV came back into my focus. "Have you ever wanted to unlock the powers of your mind?"

"Oh, shut the fuck up," I actually said out loud, and switched the channel.




"Looks like I'll be here Thursdays and Saturdays," he said, smiling and showing off his celebrity-white teeth of his.

"Nice," I supplied.

"I guess I'll have to come up with material, I didn't really expect this to go anywhere. That is, if people care that they're original songs. I could just prepare some of my practices. Or improvise."

Improvise? "Improvise?"

"Yeah, over some chords. You just get a loop going and then pick at the scales that those chords are a part of, makes it sound neat."

The sun was setting, and we were sitting by a window that gave a view of the highway. The Coffee Beetle had invested in some serious soundproofing for the vibe, so you couldn't really hear the cars, but I always had this thing where if I was looking at something I just sorta heard it anyways. So, looking at the window at the cars that had just turned their headlights on 'cause it was getting dark, I almost felt that vibration when the windows shake from a big thing passing by. That, and the hum it makes. But they were far away. So mostly I was just imagining it.

"Yeah," I circled back to the conversation, "it really does."

That vibration of the windows was what really put me to sleep. Not that guitar playing my dad did. It was that the train always came at night. And fuck, it was loud, and it shook the house like thunder, but that was absolutely what I needed. Something loud and big and fuckoff powerful. That's the kind of shit that really felt like home. Not that dingy little room. My apartment. My place.

My eyes peeled away from the window when I noticed Han hadn't said anything back in a while. When my eyes met his, he looked stern. No expression, except for that ghost of one that his half-shut eye gave him. Like he was just looking at me for the sake of looking at me.

But he gave a short smile, and then took a sip of his drink, and attempted to clear the air.

"So what's up with you?"

I shrugged. "Same shit."

He looked at me again. Just a slight smile, like I couldn't tell he was just looking at me. I tried to give him, like, a what? sorta look, but he didn't seem to respond.

"We haven't hung out in a while," he said instead.

"We hang out plenty, whadya mean?"

"I mean off your lunch breaks. I want a Sam day. You up to do something later this week? I just got off my last job, so, my schedule is flexible."

I huffed. "I work nights, which is when most of the fun stuff happens, but sure."

"You feeling alright?"

I just raised my eyebrows at him. "What kind of a question is that? If you're asking it, you know."

The espresso maker hissed from behind the counter. Someone was trying to get their big-ass harp on stage, and struggling with it.

"Just giving you room to talk."

I made eye contact again. He was giving me that look, but without the smile. Totally honest, too. Just looking at me to look at me again.

Man, Han was way too good with this emotional manipulation shit. I wasn't used to it. None of my friends in high school ever did that stuff. Made me feel like a total asshole sometimes, and I was gonna try to make this not be one of those times, so I played into it just to get him to stop making that face at me.

"Yeah, thanks," I said. "I mean, how about tonight? I get off earlier than usual, we can meet in four hours at 9:00, figure out shit to do from there. I dunno. Improvise."

That got him to give me a little smile. "Alright, I'll get out my laptop and be doing work until then."

I looked around the room. The dim room, with the little localized lamps and shit. That harp player was really getting comfortable, Glo was helping him set up a mic 'cause she was good with that production stuff.

My eyes came back to Han, who was still looking at me and smiling.

And fuck it, I smiled back. "Thanks, for real."

He raised a hand to be all humble about it.

"I gotta get back to work though," I said. "Four hours. See you."

"See you," he said back, and as I stood up to go to the backroom he reached into his bag and pulled out his laptop.




[They meet, sun is setting but it's not cold 'cause it's Phoenix, and they start walking and talking. There's some bean-spilling here, but the encouragement that Han is giving Sam is making Sam more upset and angry, and there comes a point when Han admits that he "wasn't feeling" guitar, and he was probably going to drop it anyways. I imagine this comes up when Han is trying to encourage Sam to try new things if he wants to try new things, and suggests that he could give Sam his own guitar because he's not gonna need it soon. This pisses off Sam because that's just another thing where he feels like if he was Han, he would be grateful every day for every skill he was needlessly and effortlessly amazing at. There needs to be some zinger line: "If I were you, well I'd blank!" And that's when it happens.]




[Sam's body slumps to the ground, and we have a disorienting scene in which Sam realize that he now inhabits Han's body. In their walking, and in the setting sun, they ended up somewhere pretty private. Sam, as Han, freaks out. Sam's certain he just killed Han or something. His own body is alive, but comatose. He calms himself down, kind of, and makes his plan.]




[Sam looks himself in the mirror, gets the heeby-jeebies, and then thinks of what he's going to do, what is he gonna do? But as he's mulling it over, he's getting kind of giddy. He can't go in to his work, because he's not Sam anymore. He's Han. He's gotta do what Han does. And wasn't that the whole idea? Now, he gets to be mobile, versatile, skilled. He's not stuck. Holy shit, he's not stuck anymore. Somewhere in here, sprinkle in a nagging feeling like there's some thought in the back of his head he can't figure out.]




[Sam holds Han's funeral. By scouring Han's apartment, he found all the things he felt were most sentimental to Han, and buried them somewhere I'll figure out later. He gives a little speech, and it includes: "Though you didn't mean to, and though I didn't mean to take it from you, by some whim of the universe, you've given me the greatest gift a friend ever could. Their life. I'll try and do you proud, Han. It's gonna be like you never left." He places some roses over the unmarked grave, and then gets in his car. He looks in the rearview mirror, and in the backseat is Han's guitar. "Gonna do you proud, buddy," he mutters to himself.]




[He comes into the cafe. He meets with the manager, who's doing Sam's job. They greet warmly, but the boss is worried. "You seen Sam around?" Sam acts confused. "No, not recently." They have a back and forth, like how the manager hasn't heard from Sam in a while, and Sam comes up with an excuse in the middle of it, like Han just remembered that Sam told him he had saved up enough to tour the states. "He didn't tell you? Weird. I guess he must have just… wanted to move on." You know, he says something sly like that. "Anyways, it's open mic night, right?"

The boss, still slightly worried but mostly disappointed that Sam quit so unceremoniously (maybe Sam as Han also feigns some resentment towards Sam, alluding to his own self-hate): "Sure is! Go take a seat. Glad to have you back."

He gets up on stage, sets up with Han's guitar, and plays… poorly. But the thing is, as the customers give him weird looks, he just starts smiling like a madman, and keeps playing. And as he loses more inhibitions, he completely leans into how bad he's being, and starts getting whacky with it. Eventually, the manager comes over, and is like: "Hey, I don't wanna be rude," blah blah blah tries to give Han the out that y'know maybe something's going on in his life, and Sam kinda drops the act and returns to being his old, kind of rude self, and makes a bad impression on the manager, who says something like "maybe I won't be asking you back, then," and Sam kinda spits out "it was an open mic anyways, I can do what I damn well please," and storms out. But… in strangely high spirits.

Outside, he gets that same nagging feeling again, but stronger. Strong enough he has to put a hand to his head. "Better get home quick, in case this evolves into a serious headache."]




[He gets back home, and goes over to his bed, where the lifeless body of Sam is still lying, "watching TV." He's heard some things about bed sores, so he moves his own body a couple times. He then goes into the kitchen, where Han's phone is on the counter. He's currently getting barraged with texts, but Sam doesn't know the password to Han's phone so he hasn't been able to answer them yet. Also, he doesn't really want to.

He makes two meals, maybe spaghetti, something stupid simple. He eats one, and then he chews the other, and places the chewed up bites into Sam's mouth, while something on the TV once again is showing something thematically relevant. He has to massage Sam's throat to make him swallow automatically. After that, he gives his original body water in a very similar way. But there's still that feeling in the back of his mind.

He goes into the bathroom, looks himself — Han — in the mirror, and has a strange "conversation" with himself. His head feels stranger and stranger, and he feels like he's having to fight to stay awake, even if it isn't pain.]




[But then a scream wakes him up, and he shoots up in bed. In bed? Watching TV, mouth still tasting a little like spaghetti, throat dry and lower back sore as hell. But then, from bed, he watches Vihaan scramble out of the bathroom, and then they make f contact as the weight of the situation dawns on both of them.

"Han?" Sam gets out weakly. But Han doesn't really stop to talk. Han rushes towards the door, but Sam, in blind panic, doesn't make it there first, but grabs ahold of Han. That was one, just one thing he had over Han: from working at the warehouse longer, he'd done a lot more heavy lifting, and Han was a pretty slim guy already. There's a fight, with few words going between them, Sam trying to calm Han down, Han being absolutely spooked (to put it lightly), and eventually Sam realizes that there's no "talking sense" into Han. Han, however, also realizes that this is a losing battle, and tries (and fails) to talk to Sam, trying to get Sam to let him go, and Sam goes silent, thinking, and after a bit, says: "Yes. But not yet," flashing Han a sad smile.

He drags Han, kicking and screaming, into the bathroom, and locks him in there, by way of a chair. Sam is telling Han that they'll come get him later, while he finds all his things… but, Sam realizes, there's very little of his life he doesn't mind leaving behind. Han is pleading, crying out in the bathroom, while Sam gets this big-ass grin. "Things are changing," he says to himself. "Things are changing, Han!"

Han doesn't respond very well.

"You don't mind if I take your guitar, do you?"

No coherent response.

"He doesn't," Sam says to himself, "he was gonna give it to me anyways."

Sam walks out of his apartment, takes the elevator down, and then walks out onto the street. But now, when he looks at people, he feels this pull, this draw to them. They're all ships, and crews can be switched out, he feels. I need a really strong ending line here, but the point is, he's walking through a crowded sidewalk, and he starts feeling like he doesn't know where he ends and they start… but not in that spiritual epiphany way. I want a growing, creepy, unsettling vibe.

"Finally. Things are changing."]

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