She talks to me in front of a blank white wall.
It is all I know of her house
perhaps all I will ever know.
Yet I glimpse things
imagine them:
an alcove
dark bricks with vines
plum trees
an ancient stone gate
two sets of steps
also stone.
Through a window a metal
bench in a dreary mist
near a small pond with reeds,
lilies, and white-barked trees.
This is all in my head of course.
She is thousands of miles across an ocean
thinking in a different language as
she tries to learn mine.
We laugh together
and are sad together.
We have never met.
We may never meet.
A friendship borne of Covid
and my love of French.
The images play against her wall
like my dream.