I'm not sleeping tonight. I can't — if I sleep, I won't see him. 

Some girls talk about meeting their "dream guy." They might describe him as faceless, or his face is the moon, and his Henley clings to an impressive mountain of muscles that shifts as he talks and makes everyone laugh, cry, or cum. These girls sleep like normal people, and they dedicate those eight peaceful hours to getting into trouble — they're riding in a car with no driver, they're crashing through the air. It's terrifying! But then Dream Guy swoops in with his bratwurst arms and saves them. He hops into the driver's seat, his forehead veins about to pop with the pleasure of his good deed, and he slams the brakes; he whips out a memory foam mattress just before his Sleeping Beauty can hit the ground. 

It's all bullshit, if you ask me. I don't want to be saved. I want sacrifice. And, by staying awake, I've found someone who's worth it. 

It started in September. That's my favorite time of year because the air starts smelling different. It smells like dead leaves and pumpkin seeds 'cause September wind carries ghosts on it  — myself as a child, wearing a velvet hairband on the first day of third grade, myself at 15, drawing demons with my breath on the school bus window. That was around when I started playing my favorite FPS, Atomic Angel. I got obsessed with it fast, since it lets you actually customize your character instead of making you play as another military sniper with C cups. Not that there's anything wrong with that — it's just not me. 

It's been seven years since then, and I've used the same username the whole time: new_bathsheba. I'm not really religious or anything, I just always liked the Gentileschi paintings. My headcanon is that my character is a scorned wife who jumps off a bridge to be reborn in the water beneath it. Instead of drowning, she emerges in the pearl clouds of Permaheaven (that's where the game takes place) impenetrable, with whip-like braids down to her ass and an intrinsic knowledge of Kalashnikov rifles.   

I play Atomic Angel all the time, but I'd been playing more in September since there was a new event called Blood Crossing. The idea was that the Atomic Angels NPCs had decided to dip unbreakable arrows in their own blood. They started shooting them down from Permaheaven at the miserable humans ambling beneath it, hoping that mixing the two species' blood might create a novel angelic army with a better immune system. Angels are prone to colds and coughs. As an Atomic Soldier, my job was to gun down the Earth Demons that threatened the Angels' holy mission.

So, one day in September, I was headshotting losers like usual when I noticed that Uriel, the Angel who keeps track of your KD, was looking at me differently. 

I know it sounds insane. But I don't want your feedback. Uriel's silvery eyes are usually wintry and impersonal — they communicate "acquire the payload" and "fall back!" without much sentimentality. But on that day in September, they were full of longing. 

I leaned in closer to my PC. I admit, at that point, I'd been awake for around 60 hours. I didn't mean to be such a delinquent, but I had pulled an all-nighter to study, and then I got too caught up playing Atomic Angel the next night to remember it was time for bed. I usually have trouble sleeping, but I'd never stayed awake for so long before. It was all right. Less sleep means more time on my computer, and more time spent inhaling my favorite autumn night air…

I remember the crickets were singing their nighttime song. Some frat guy was blasting "Sweet Caroline," too. I breathed in near my open window and then took a hit from my vape. In that moment, Uriel's gaze shifted from his usual vague, Basset Hound stare and focused right on me. Not only in my eyes, but into my beating heart. I nearly choked on my Celsius. And I knew he loved me. 

Uriel was always my favorite Angel. He doesn't have much in-game lore, but I'm familiar with all the important things. Like, he ascended to blessedness after getting shot in the face by his evil stepfather. As a human, Uriel was meek and terrified — of his parents, death, girls, trivial shit like that. He was trapped in mediocrity until his worst fear happened, and it freed him. The Sky Thing — the interorbital being that presides over Permaheaven — scooped his corpse up from the cold marble floor of his parents' haunted mansion. The Sky Thing breathed a clean, blue soul back into Uriel, along with several extraordinary abilities: pyrokinesis, rapid regeneration, and a very sexy, submarine-deep voice. It makes him more convincing. And sexier, as I mentioned. 

I'd always liked that death made Uriel stronger and hotter. I kind of grew up like him, with bad parents. My upbringing made me think of death as a warm sweater I could slouch into whenever I got too scared. While my parents threw porcelain plates at the wall and each other, I'd lie awake in bed for hours imagining the ways I'd do it. Crash my car into the living room. Hold my head down in the bath. Take 40 or 100 of my mom's benzos. 

Those thoughts went away when I started playing Atomic Angel. The game scratches the same itch. My teenage crush on Uriel helped, too. Actually, for a few years, I wrote a garbage fanfic series where my self-insert disarmed his fucked-up stepfather before he could blow Uriel's brains out. In the fic, Uriel is grateful for my expert de-escalation skills, and he asks me to walk beside him in my combat boots, as his protector, until we can graduate high school and get married. Once that happens, we get a small apartment in the city together and a black cat, and I take him to museums every weekend to see my favorite Baroque paintings.

I stopped writing it as soon as I was old enough to feel embarrassed, but if I'm honest, I kept looking for pieces of Uriel in every dude I dated. Remember, I'd been staring at his face on my screen for years. Uriel had become my ideal man accidentally, like how some freaks only date guys that look like their brothers. 

So it would be offensive to call what happened to me this September a "dream." It goes way beyond that. 

Uriel extricated himself from my computer like he'd completed a prison sentence. I thought about peeing my pants, but I gasped instead. Uriel's '90s Leo haircut emerged first, and then his neck, and then the magnificent eagle's wingspan of his shoulders. I thought, maybe, I was hallucinating. 

But once Uriel had completely slithered out of my PC and set his mud-stained boots on my carpet, it was obvious. Here was a real man standing right in front of me. And he chose me. That first day, he grabbed both of my hands and leaned in close, until I could feel his breath (his breath!) heating the tip of my nose like the sun. 

"I don't know why I'm here," he whispered. "But I think it's because of you." 

I shivered. He smiled. My frozen heart melted while I looked into his snow-colored eyes. They shined with something I never noticed before. 

Fear? Opportunity? I think that love is a combination of both. 

We've been meeting every other night since then, on the days I don't sleep. I was skeptical of this arrangement at first. I'd never met a man worth losing sleep over before. But, one time, while we sat on the floor with our knees touching, Uriel explained to me that the human REM cycle usually closes our souls off to the potential of interdimensional romance. Dreams are noisy; they take up all the space we'd otherwise keep vacant for alien lovers, or other celestial sweethearts. 

It makes so much fucking sense. By powering ourselves off in this world, we give up on accessing another. I could have cried with the realization — I never felt like I fit in much on Earth, but, this whole time, there's been more waiting for me. It surpasses everything I could have hoped for, and it's certainly greater than anything I imagine while asleep.

That's why I've decided to stay awake. So I have someone to kiss, who pricks my finger and rubs the blood on his cracked mouth. 

It's not as weird as it sounds. Angels absorb nutrients through their plush lips, and blood's the only food Uriel has the stomach for right now. It makes me feel closer to him. 

Plus, Uriel tells me the Blood Crossing event was kind of accurate in that way. Melding my A+ with his whatever-the-fuck doesn't create a eugenics superrace like Atomic Angel says, but it does make Uriel more indestructible. He guesses that, whenever he decides to live only in the game again (I pray that day is far from now), he'll probably be a much better summon, with increased vigor. 

We do all kinds of normal late-night dates, too. He sits on my twin mattress and lets me pick a movie, and he shows me how to conjure flames without a match. Then we look into each other's wet eyes for a while before we play some Atomic Angel. Uriel is really tuned into the meta. 

It's all been incredible, but, you know, nothing's perfect. Uriel's full of energy, but I keep snoring in class like a bitch. And my friends have noticed some other changes — the shadows under my eyes are starting to look more like the dark side of the waning moon, and I keep stumbling over my words. But that part isn't because of the sleep deprivation. It's because I'm transcending the galaxy through love. 

Uriel feels the same way. He seems more sure about me all the time. Every night he visits me, his cargo shirt blowing open when it meets my box fan, I notice his skin seems brighter. His blinding white teeth are dulled, like in a human way. He greets me by kissing my neck, and my knees go weak as I notice he's standing straighter than usual. When Uriel first visited me, he could barely walk, like a newborn foal. But now he stomps around my room with purpose, changing my life. I don't mind. That's what I'm here for.