It began when I heard a sentence: “He wanted to talk again, suddenly.” The words cut sharply into the jumble of to-do lists, fantasies, snippets of possible writing, worry, and leftover traces of postpartum depression that constituted my mind in the early months of 1993. Who wants to talk, I wondered?

Instantly, the laughing face of my beloved friend—I’ll call him Ian—appeared in my mind. He’d died seven years earlier of AIDS.

I had mementos of him, photos of us together at Studio 54 and glamorous parties, but he was gone, and no tokens could bring him back. He was resistant to being a memory, too; Ian had been the definition of presence, and handsomeness, and elegance, and high spirits. When he was with you, he was there completely, his attention and wit undivided, so that when you and he sashayed past the velvet rope into a nightclub, or plopped down on the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, or took a walk on dark downtown streets at three in the morning, you felt the world coalesce around you, and you were at its white-hot center.

The scene in In the Gloaming where Laird pretends to be from I.R.S. outreach and gets a whole bus of New Yorkers laughing and chatting was typical of how Ian engaged with the world. I had many such happy memories, but I avoided them; they hurt too much. I had learned earlier in life that the only way I could cope with devastating loss was to slough off the version of myself that loved the person or the place and become someone else. During Ian’s illness, I’d stopped going out and staying up all night; it wasn’t fun without him.

The words were inside of me, and I was being called to compose a story.

After he died, I got married, wrote a book, had a baby. He knew nothing of this version of me. The Al (as he called me) who smoked incessantly, loved putting wild outfits together, and never turned down an opportunity to go dancing—she no longer existed. In a sense, my old self died with him.

Then “He wanted to talk again, suddenly.” I experienced that sentence as coming from a separate consciousness than mine. I was quite anxious at that time, worried about my aging grandparents, worried about my toddler, who’d spent the first days of his life in a plastic box in the NICU. My writing was stalled by perfectionism; my holographic pages looked more like heavily redacted government documents than stories. Underneath it all, I was grieving for Ian.

Suddenly, here he was. What did he want to talk about? Was this an episode of esprit de l’escalier, the moment when you are on the stairs after a jagged and unresolved interaction and are struck with a sudden clarity about what you wish you’d said? Had Ian realized what it was he’d wanted to say in life and come to tell me now? To be clear, this wasn’t a ghost, and I didn’t hear an actual voice. The words were inside of me, and I was being called to compose a story. Yet I was also in touch with Ian in a way I hadn’t been for years, and willing to write toward why he’d returned to speak to me.