Marketplace

There is a distance that settles differently when someone speaks into it. I am writing this from Bilbao, a city on the Spanish coast where the nights have gone still and cool. Fifteen days ago I sent a message to Zarynt, someone I have been in correspondence with for a long while now, who lives far across the water in Freetown. The reaching moved slowly across that space, and for a time the quiet just held, unanswered. But tonight the words came back, and in them was something I needed to hear as much as Zarynt needed to hear what I had said.