In the afterlife, matter follows the shape of the mind. In another body you would have still been just a little bit taller. In my dreams I am always looking up at your chin, your broad shoulders. At times I decide to take matters in my own hands. Ten milligrams of melatonin and a knife under my pillow. When I sleep I dream I am a rib taken out of your chest. You text me the next morning like I had never left. I make you for the park that we remember and you're sixteen years old and smiling.

"It is easier to build myself into the world than to be born of it," you say.

Frequently we'd allude to you coming from another time, another place, but I never quite knew what you meant by that. In the new body you're light and strong and dance easy on your feet. Under the gazebo we laugh and spin into each other's arms. It's almost too much for me to bear. You still have gold in your eyes and fire in your chest. and your sweater smells like strawberries and burnt grass.

I ask about unfinished business, about what you had intended to say in your time.

"The living don't owe you anything," you say. "When you're gone, you're gone."

We end up wandering the corridors of the old campus, which I have set up for you just as you remember it. Bright hallways with cracked concrete and little squares and triangles set into the walls. Your hand is warm in mine and I remember what it is like to feel again with the heart. I tell you about Helen of Troy, how it was not her that appeared in Troy as prize but her eidolon, her name, her memory. The heroes sail and fight and die but she is not in the city, her image is god-borne while she is elsewhere in the southern country, making supplications on the banks of the Nile.

"I want to be Helen in your memory forever," I say.

"Listen," you say, "this is all very nice and I've missed you very much, but you've left the knife under the pillow. There will be more of me coming through, and you need to be ready for when that happens."

"How?" I ask.

"By imagining more worlds where I do not exist," you say.

We continue to share our memories until the point where it all breaks. (I, who survived on the other side, try to write through the incompehensibility of it all. The version of you that loved me is far less flattering; it is more comfortable to imagine that both of us are dead.)