I was ready to call it all bullshit. Then I made a drink move with my mind.

It was 2017. A bad breakup and a stalled career had left me feeling like everything was already dead. I was a mercenary codemonkey in a pre-AI world, patching up an ancient Python app for a university. The project's stakeholder died mid-way through, and I became a ghost in the machine, forgotten until the quarterly budget review.

It all tipped me into a quarter-life crisis, one I decided to handle by intentionally losing my mind. It had been a long time coming, and I didn’t want to be insufferable about it. If I was going to fall apart, I figured I might as well make it entertaining for everyone involved. That it wouldn’t be entertaining for anyone—least of all me—I didn’t know at the time.

I was at the old Spider House Cafe, my only companions: chips and queso, a jack'n'coke, and a glowing terminal. The work was a dead end, and I knew it. As I was wrestling with the broken code, I felt a deep sense of inertia. I didn't just want a drink; I wanted something, anything, to just come to me for once.

For I've long given up hope on anything coming up Milhouse.

But then, for a split second, the clatter of the cafe seemed to fade. The world narrowed to the glass.

And then it happened.

The glass slid across the table toward me. It wasn't a gentle nudge. It moved with purpose until it was about to tip over the edge. My reflexes kicked in, and I snatched it from the air.

My heart pounded. Had I leaned on the table? No, everything else was still. The nachos, the laptop - they hadn't moved an inch. It was the drink, answering a silent call.

I moved it with my mind. The thought was so absurd I almost laughed. I didn't try it again. I was too afraid to find out it was a fluke. I stood up and looked around, wondering if someone was playing a trick on me, some streamer farming me for content.

I kept thinking: if I had put my weight on the table, wouldn't everything have come toward the edge, not just the drink?

Who knows. Everyone was too busy talking about who knows what, or looking at their phones to confirm. No one noticed the impossible.

Not long after, I was in the thin, cold air of the Rocky Mountains, at a ghost town called St. Elmo, 8,000 feet in the clouds. I had two tabs of strong LSD and a new, terrifying mission: to talk to angels.