The night is cold and dark, and the milky moon hardly a sliver, hiding behind spindly, leafless branches. I walk down the trail crudely outlined by oak trees, and try to ignore their ominous shadows playing against the gravelly forest floor. For a fleeting moment, I'm afraid the creeping, dancing shadows are real, and my fears are only heightened when a knot in a tree trunk morphs into a face and gives me a sinister wink. I squeeze my eyes shut, until the only things I can see are blurry, blue-black spots behind my eyelids. When I open my eyes again, the shadows are gone, and the knot in the wood is only a knot in the wood. Glad, in a sort of twisted way, that they're just a hallucination, I breathe a sigh of relief.

Subconsciously, I fiddle with the camera strap crossed against my chest, and resume my walk through the forest, silently reprimanding myself for being so paranoid. The woods behind Haverford College are familiar to me, the paths worn down from the amount of times I've snuck out at five in the morning just to catch the first rays of sunlight as they creep out from behind the mountains, or to savour the last few moments of complete and utter silence, before the overlapping voices of waking students drown out the song of the early morning birds. I shouldn't be so paranoid, shouldn't be seeing so many hallucinations at once, but I guess I only have myself to blame for that, tossing out weeks worth of little yellow pills over the balcony of my dorm room and into the bushes below. I feel guilty afterwards, but not guilty enough to make myself take them, not guilty enough to willingly put myself into a hazy, drug-induced stupor that's supposedly going to make my schizophrenic hallucinations go away. I hate myself when I'm on those pills, hate the way my mind feels cloudy and how everything seems brighter and more glaring. And besides, in the past eight months, I've felt myself grow better at discerning hallucinations and delusions from reality.

Soon, I come to an abandoned grassy clearing, empty save for a rusting metal bench that looks out over a small, murky pond, but I didn't expect much else. I sit down, the cold metal biting through my corduroy pants and black overcoat, and take a deep breath, brisk, Vermont-fall air filling my lungs. The view from where I am is beautiful, and I can't help but raise my camera to take a picture of it, one more photograph to develop in the dark room and pin onto my ever-growing wall of photos. The camera feels comfortable and familiar in my hands, the one thing that makes me feel truly at home. It's the only reason I'm here in the first place, studying Photography at Haverford instead of locked up in some insane asylum like I sometimes think I deserve to be. When I had just been diagnosed with schizophrenia, depressed and unable to tell the difference between what was real and what was not, photography helped me come back to myself, helped me realize that I was still fundamentally myself. My morbid longing for the picturesque hadn't disappeared along with my sanity. When I lower the camera, I hear the sound of footsteps on gravel behind me, but when I whip around to see where it came from, there's nothing there. The wind howls in my ear, whispering, telling me that what I came to see has been here the whole time. When I turn back around to face the pond, a tall figure in a cable knit sweater stands in front of me, a long black coat billowing around him. Oliver Woodbridge. My face breaks out into a smile, and I beckon for him to sit.

"Hey," I breathe out, a happiness I haven't felt for a long time bubbling up inside me.

He smirks as he takes his spot next to me, pale skin glowing in the moonlight, sharp jawline and cheekbones defined by shadows. "Suus 'etiam diu fuit, Wren," he says in Latin. It's been too long, Wren.

"How have you been?"

"The same as ever."

It's the same response he's always given me, cryptic and secretive and very much Oliver. Long legs crossed, slender hands occupied with lighting a thin Marlboro cigarette, he's elegant and poised, the epitome of a dignified theater student. He attends Wheaton Collegiate, a little ways from Haverford, and our sworn rivals. But to me, Oliver is anything but that. My best friend since the first grade, he's the only one to know about my schizophrenia other than my parents, and the only one who treats it as some morbidly beautiful, tragic flaw. The Shakespearian tragedy in him causes him to view everything in life as something worth romanticising. And really, I guess that's why I'm drawn to him. He took something that threatened to rip my world apart and spun it into something to be cryptic and mysterious about.

Between a languid exhale of smoke, he asks how I've been.

"Better now that I saw you." I tell him. "Classes are boring, the people are boring, and really, the only exciting things in my life are hallucinations and meeting you at midnight."

These meetings in the dead of night were Oliver's idea, since according to him, the mystery of nighttime is much more intimate and exciting than daytime. I hadn't questioned this, already used to his sporadic and sometimes unreasonable requests.

He shakes his head slowly and laughs, but there's a glimmer of something I can't quite place in his eyes. "Sounds exciting."

"It really is," I bite sarcastically.

We fall into an easy silence, each other's presence enough to fill the gaps. I rest my head on his shoulder the way I have so many times before, especially the one summer when people constantly came over with casseroles and sad, watery smiles, dressed in all black and tiptoeing around me like I was a china glass figure about to shatter. To this day, I still don't know what happened that summer.

We rest that way for a while, leaning against each other until the moon passes her weary course and the constellations are worn down from our tracing fingertips. We exchange phrases in Greek and Latin, I show him the most recent photographs I took, he recites Shakespearean passages from The Tempest.

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on,
And our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

When dawn's first rosy tendrils crawl over the tops of the mountains, Oliver stamps out his cigarette with the heel of his shoe and looks back at me, his silhouette darkened by the backlight.

"You should go." I say reluctantly. For the first time in a long time, I feel good. Happy, even. Every inch of my being yearns to stop him from leaving, but with the perpetual smirk plastered on his face, he bids farewell and starts to walk away.

"Donec iterum, Wren," he says, his back to me. Until next time, Wren.

"Donec iterum," I return, and watch as he disappears back into the woods, his figure swallowed up by the darkness. A heavy weight settles back in my stomach, and I can't bring myself to walk back to campus right now. Instead, I let my hand rest where he had been sitting moments before, warm from his body, and watch the sunrise. The bench feels empty without his presence, the only thing there a bronze metal commemoration plaque glued on the back. My fingers absentmindedly trace the letters carved into it:

In loving memory of Oliver Woodbridge, anima eius in pace. (may his soul rest in peace)