Yet I am haunted by the feeling that we might not meet again, that this might be just our one moment in the great sweep of things. Once, as I lay on the floor, breathing through oxygen tubes, looking past the somber faces of paramedics, I saw your tears, and I felt a great sadness, worrying not about myself, but rather that I might not find you again in the swirling crowds out there in the centuries to come. It was the loss of you, not life, that I feared.

For we have come by different ways to this place. I have no feeling that we met before. No deja vu. I don't think it was you in the lavender by the sea as I rode by in AD 1206 or beside me in the border wars. Or there in the Gallatins, a hundred years ago, lying with me in the silver-green grass above some mountain town. I can tell by the natural ease with which you wear fine clothes and the way your mouth moves when you speak to waiters in good restaurants. You have come the way of castles and cathedrals, of elegance and empire.

If you were there in the Gallatins, you were married to a wealthy rancher and lived in a grand house. I was a gambler at the table or the mountain man at the bar or the fiddler in the corner, playing a slow waltz to his memories. The dust from your carriage was of more value than my life in those days, and it drowned me in longing and sullied my dreams as you passed by in the street. Somehow, though, for this life and this time, we came together. You taught me about caring and softness and intimacy. The task before me was to teach you about music. And dreams. And how to savor the smell of ancient cities and the sound of cards whispering across green felt. This I have done.
 
So I rest secure knowing that you have learned and that, in another time, you might recognize me coming across the street of some gambler's town, in high brown boots with an old fiddle case over my shoulder, as your carriage moves by in the dust. And perhaps you will smile and nod and, for a strange and flickering moment, you will remember how the waves of January wash the sea wall at Marigot.

From Slow Waltz for Georgia Ann by Robert James Waller