For a good fifteen minutes, it had appeared as though this wasn’t going to work: we tried hanging up and calling back a few times, but inevitably the Skype window would blink open and all I would see was green snow, tumbling down my monitor in aggravated swirls. “Can you see me yet?” you’d ask.

We’d resigned ourselves to it, another way to miss contact. Then I heard some rustling, your hands moving chords. “Wait!” you said. “I think I’ve figured it out.”

And suddenly there you were — green-eyed, bearded now, wearing some unreadable expression — hesitancy maybe, an unfamiliar shyness. “Oh!” I said, hands flying to my face. “I can see you, I can see you.”