Coffee's made, I dump the filter.  The wet Melitta-wrapped grounds fall and thud like a dead body in the trash.  Sipping the first cup of the day.  The dream was this: You were there, driving me somewhere like so often in the past.  I was having a day of fitfull consciousness like I do, faking wide-eyed fascination and manically grinning.  But behind the vacant face I was the same grumbling bitch who thinks he hates life. 

We were going to lunch.  You loved to 'lunch', you had such a civility, such an informal grace...  We are both belly-ed and graying old men, but we played in my dream like kids, like we used to, with no objective and no intent, just a swimming floating focus, with giggles and shiny bubbles and a million droplets of time sparkling in summer sunlight. 

Somewhere during our outing, I remembered you had died years before.  It came back to me in obscure fragments, out of place as we chatted animatedly; an illness, a decline, a time of those you loved gathering in your care, raving dementia, and finally death.  There were broken memories of a formal end—a funeral, memorial gatherings, honors bestowed posthumously—and people keeping you.  I remembered them talking about you, tenderly and unselfconsciously recounting your demise, revisiting the timeless love they felt for you.  They kept it all like a precious heirloom. 

I became aware that you were deliberately deceiving me, pretending that you had never died.  You were probably hoping that my inconsistent awareness—my fitful embrace of reality—would allow your deceit to succeed.  But I told you I knew, though not right away.  I allowed this curious deception to continue, while the fragments of my memory gradually realigned to form an incomplete suggestion of what had been real.  You finally acknowledged that, yes, you had died.  Yet here you were with me as if it hadn't happened. 

I asked why you were allowed to fold reality back on itself so uncommonly.  You said you had people to visit, friends still living, but your implication was unclear; I didn't know if they needed you, or if you needed them.  There were historic figures, Catherine the Great among them—we never played with her—and others.  You recounted dramas from these lives, some of the characters I vaguely knew, and you seemed pleasantly surprised when I asked you specific questions about those dramas, using the names of the individuals involved; it was as if you hadn't expected me to have been listening.  This made you smile. 

Let's lunch, shall we?