"I do not know which of us has written this page." [1]

There came a time when, well after you left the Review for good, we were discussing your poem. I had the floor, when someone called out, "She's defending it as if she wrote it." The poem was called "A Kasian ode."

Little did they know that I'd once told you, "When I met you I had never met anyone quite like you, except maybe myself." Or that you had gripped the sticky John Jay table and confessed you sometimes swore I was your thought, come to life.

I was careless with attributions all those years. My notes from our Putin sessions do not distinguish between our voices. How fitting, then, that during our first Skype tryst, you could hear my voice, but I could not hear yours, and that during the second, it was the other way around.

[1] Borges