I remember this. This has all happened before. It was a dream of a previous life, or a film that I saw once a hundred years ago, grainy footage playing over the canvas, throwing vegetables on the stage, shooting the piano player. You were there. Laughing in my ear. I spoke to you and kissed your cheekbone. We escaped hand in hand to your little studio apartment on the lower west side, and we made love until the sun fell down between the buildings. Heated. Soaking. Unhinged.

There was no medicine then, no nightmares, no typing or endless code. My car? It was a Model-T. On the weekends I’d put the top down and we’d fly, or it seemed like flying at forty-five miles an hour, and sing into the wind, and look crinkly-eyed at each other, loving to the point of bursting. See that tree? We made love under that tree. It was before the railroad was built.

Pull the covers over my head. Yes, you’re stronger now. I stick my tongue out at you. They’re endlessly putting up the new building over there across the lake, and the sound of the beeping trucks arrives in my dreams, even when you’re in them. But when you kiss me it all falls away.

Am I awake? Have I been awake and alive this whole time? It’s only begun to seem real, since you walked in. I know you were here before I was, lying here ghostly in my bed, waiting for me to see you. I saw you when we were children, when our children died in the trenches in France, when I died while your daughter was first opening her eyes to the world and the linens between my legs were soaked with blood. I saw you when you placed that first cornerstone, I was digging up our garden and you were about to drink from the stream. I saw you when I’d laced my corset too tight and I was making faces at you on the train, trying to breathe.

Today you’re holding me. You’re holding me and I’m a child, I’m a woman, I’m here but I am gone. Your nightmare has disappeared for now and your dream is in your arms. Where did you come from? you ask me. I have been here all the time, I say. This is the first time we’ve met, face to face, but I’ve been here since the gods made the world.