Of course we are soulmates.  We knew each other a hundred years ago.  You were a librarian, writing short stories in your spare time for Harper’s Weekly and American Magazine.  I was an office clerk in a tool and die company.  I was one of the last Americans to be drafted that year, sent to fight the Kaiser’s men in northern France.   You and I wrote nearly every day, right up until the day before I was killed at Belleau Wood a few months later, in June of 1918.

After my personal effects were returned to my family, my sister bundled up your letters to me and returned them to you with a note of condolence.  You put them in the same box you kept my letters in, and put the box in your attic.

When you died in 1968, your youngest granddaughter inherited the box, and stowed it in her own attic.  Fifty years later, your great-great granddaughter had it passed down to her.  She took it home and stashed the letters in her bedroom closet, where they still sit.  The paper has yellowed, the edges slowly flaking away to dust.  But our words are still there, yours nestled atop mine, now and forever.