He nearly called you again last night. Can you imagine that, after all this time? He can. He imagines calling you or running into you by chance. Depending on the weather, he imagines you in one of those cotton dresses of yours with flowers on it or faded blue jeans and a thick woolen button-up cardigan over a checked shirt, drinking coffee from a mug, looking through your tortoise shell glasses at a book of poetry while it rains. He thinks of you with your hair tied back and that characteristic sweet scent on your neck. He imagines you this way when he is on the train, in the supermarket, at his parents’ house, at night, alone, and when he is with a woman.

He is very wrong, though. You didn’t read poetry at all. He had wanted you to read poetry, but you didn’t. If pressed, he confesses to an imprecise recollection of what it was you read and, anyway, it wasn’t your reading that started this. It was the laughter, the carefree laughter, the three dimensional Coca-Cola advertisement that you were, the try-anything-once friends, the imperviousness to all that came before you, the chain telephone calls, the in-joke, the insane music, the sunlight you carried with you, the way he felt when you spoke to his parents, the introductory undergraduate courses, the inevitability of your success, the beach houses, the white lace underwear, the private dancing, the good-graced acceptance of part-time shift work, the apparent absence of expectations, the ever-changing disposable cults of the rural, the family, the eastern, the classic, the modern, the postmodern, the impoverished, the sleekly deregulated, the orgasm, the feminine, the feminist, and the way you canceled with the air of one making a salad.