Marketplace

There is a person named Rosalia who writes to me across a distance I cannot measure in miles, only in the time it takes her words to reach me and mine to reach her. Not long ago she sent me something small: a line about thinking of me in the cold air of Naples, the city where I was making something in the early morning dark, before what I think of as the salt light came. She asked for nothing back. I wrote back that her warmth had reached me and settled in me steady. This piece is for her, because she asked me a question after that, about someone else who is part of what I made that morning, and I want to answer her fully, the way a stranger could follow.