When I dream of you it’s always during a catastrophe. We’re always the insurgents of a revolution meeting each other in the dust and rubble of bombed-out buildings. The idea is excitement and unity. Together we can go places. When we look at each other through the wire fences separating us in the detention camp, it’s the sight of your face, of both our faces looking at each other, which enables me to believe in the future.

And now, the idea of it, the picture of it always in the warm European sunlight enables me to believe in the future. And in the power of love, the power of passivity. The word ‘comrade’ springs to mind, then the comrades there are in the world, in different countries. How once I met you, I met you again and again. Suddenly we meet. You come to my house and I pretend I’m going to jump into your arms from the balcony in my pyjamas. I put a leg over the balcony and you say, Stop. I say, Okay, I’ll come down the stairs.

I break off into reverie. I try to remember the dream. A beautiful revolution. Where hardship was laughed at, so strong was our morale. I think about metaphor, how dreams are metaphor. I think of several different stories behind the dream. The revolution and our part in it. Our part in revolutions of the past. Revolutions on the personal level. The possibility of real love continuing as inspiration alone. My social life as a battle. The symbolic figure of the comrade which you embody because you were one. Sexual frustration. Facts, all scattered and without focus or thread. But as a metaphor they mean something. At the same time the metaphor shields the facts, preserves them.

Your face, lined, the same colour as the rubble and the air around us. Totally in place, at home in battle because after the battle, what then? The revolution is beautiful, not the aftermath. The dream ends with the revolution like stories end with marriage. The frozen frame.