Well, I had a dream I stood beneath an orange sky...
It happens once every couple of years. You wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep. Your memory's stuck in shuffle mode, so you roll out of bed and start digging around in the closet for some musty knickknack or photo album. Then suddenly, amid a torrent of Christmas cards and canceled stamps, you come across your box of old love letters. The handwriting on them looks kind of alien at first, like the fossilized tracks of some long-extinct life form, but soon it all starts flooding back: the whirl of cursive, the fingers that pushed the pen, the arms and shoulders and faces behind them. You wince; it stings. But it's more than just the recidivist guilt of heartbreak or the phantom-limb twinge of someone who's no longer there, more than just Hello Kitty stationery and heart-dotted i's. It's the fact that someone -- whose voice and kiss you can now barely recall -- once committed such words to you on paper, in naked black and white. They told you they loved you, and they meant it.