I was working at a place kind of like a Target. I needed to make an outgoing call, but every time I picked up the phone, there was already someone on the line — a woman, saying “Hey” and other random stuff. I unplugged that whole phone and plugged a different one in, but it was the same. I couldn’t call out, I could only either talk to her or hang up, so I decided to talk to her as I walked around the store doing stuff. We made idle conversation. It turned into an ongoing game of each of us not knowing where the other one was, kind of a guessing game with no conclusion. We started becoming friends. Somehow I was able to maintain the telephonic conversation even after I left work. It became more visual/telepathic. At one point in the middle of one of our more involved conversations — by this point I could see her but I don’t think she could see me — she said, “Hang on!” urgently, and ran down the hall of wherever she was staying. “I’m gonna have a baby!” she revealed. But there was no one there. She went into a bathroom, like she was going to just have it right there without any help. I was like “You need to go to a hospital,” and she was like “It’s OK, I’ve done this before.” There was some other context; the guy she was staying with, his name was Todd, was overbearing, overly controlling. Her felt need to do this all on her own had something to do with that. But I kept insisting, “We need to get you to a hospital,” and by this time I was somehow holding her, hugging her, but she still didn’t realize I was there. She was asking how I would get to her, how I would know where she was, and I was for some reason momentarily reluctant to end the guessing game, but finally I just admitted it: “I know where you are.” Then I let it be revealed that I was there, that I was with her. Still hugging her, only now she was aware of my presence. “I don’t know how I got here,” I said, because I really didn’t. She didn’t have any insurance, she didn’t have a job, she had kind of a trailer-trash aesthetic to her life, so I was trying to find a hospital that would take her, that also wouldn’t be awful. I think we were on our way to being successful. At some point during all this, I saw her face, looked down at her face, and there was pain in it but she was suddenly beautiful, there was strength in it too, and an adorable, pale ferocity. At that moment, I’m quite sure, in retrospect, I loved her. I woke up.