Now we’re guests in a faraway land nearly 40 years on. No trees, no cool breeze, no best friends. Only endless days spent in sending SMSs...

You are...the embodimentof immediate good karma.The equalizer between bottomfeeders and the sanctimoniouscogs in the system.

[Y]ou, one day, will knock lips with Turkish-coffee-clad veils whose beds our kin must tuck in misty-eyed.

Bob, I am grateful for yourThree letter name.It's another reminder of homeOf a world predictableOf a life I had.

You stand for what is right-for the patient and the staff.Pressures of work may down you,maybe bent but not broken.

Haris...as a naive migrantwho just moved here,relying on you tapered worries.

Even the new things thatI less than know,I keep trying, did againuntil perfect.

I am in no mood to fulminate on paper--I wish the two of us were in a room together talking of what matters most, the air thick with affinity. In January a man crawls into a cave of hopelessness; he hallucinates sympathies catching fire. Letters are glaciers, null frigates, trapping us where we are in the moment, unable to carry us on toward truth.