In 2008 I was in a village in Belize several years removed from my life in New York’s world of finance. Barefoot I lay on my back on the beach, my heals dug into the sand and wondering how had my life culminated into me being drunk on a beach on the equator with my friend Conan a medical school dropout who had developed a taste for over the counter meds that, back in the U.S. would have required a prescription.

I was a fugitive. I used every device I could imagine to evade something longer than the long arm of the American justice system. I was running from the expectation that my upbringing had groomed me for. I was a fugitive from a manufactured destiny.

Weeks later Conan would be dead under mysterious circumstances and two of the friends I had made while in country would also be dead either by their own hands or murder.

That night on the beach the clouds were thick as I laid there to the sound of the ocean lapping at the tide’s edge. I was too far gone to remember anything up until the point of me passing out. But an hour or two into the darkest part of the night the clouds had passed. I fished around for my glasses which had fallen into the sand beside me, put them on and I remember seeing the back of Conan’s head as he stood in front of me staring into a deep constellation of stars set to a backdrop of of blue-blackness.