THERE IS A LETTER HIDDEN in the wall of a New York City tenement, crammed into crumbling plaster by the eighteen-year-old girl I was—the scribbler of song lyrics in Mead notebooks, the shy cafeteria interloper.

The paper may be brittle, the ink too faint to read, but the passage of time means nothing to me. Grace Summit College and its dorm bunk beds, Jesus cheers, and spring break are a blink away.

The woman who should have received the letter is with me and has been for thirty-two years. Just not in a way in which I see and touch her anymore.

“There is an invisible world, and we are living in it.” I saw this in a magazine at the gym or the hair salon, somewhere I didn’t expect it, and felt the words go through me.

I wrote them down on a dry erase board in the break room at work, set on making the world wiser through quotes.

“The magic is everywhere,” my co-worker, Joan, said huskily, shuffling by in her tie-dye dress and clunky bracelets.

I get Amelia’s messages in dreams, where her world, our world, is vivid.

The dreams take place in variations of Amelia’s house in Oklahoma, where miles of fields and empty sky fill the landscape.

I crossed the wood floors of her living room in last night’s dream, and past an heirloom writing desk and three bedrooms.

Two wiry, bearded youths worked at a table in bathrobes alongside a young woman. I couldn’t see the print, but I knew they were laying out theGrace Summit Arts Journal, of which Amelia was still editor. They went about their tasks, putting the journal together the old way, pasting text onto boards, their exacto knives steady.

“Where is Amelia?” I said.

“She’s out of town,” the young woman looked up, almost as lovely as my Amelia. One of the male staffers offered a nod as if to confirm that the lady of the house wasn’t around.

There was something familiar about this room, and then I saw it—the staff worked at the same dining room tabl