You’re on your way to your home, and I’m at the airport and will soon be on the plane. And the moment I found an empty table in the airport café, I saw a sparrow flying over the large waiting area opposite and I thought of Tomaž Šalamun. A poet, he had the habit, whenever he came to America on his writer’s business, of calling from those hotels within reach of the airport, after his flight had been canceled, or he would simply call from an airport café like this one, and then we would chat while he waited for his flight. Ever since I’ve lived here, my most important contacts with friends have been carried out like that. Over the telephone. On one occasion, his flight from Denver was canceled because of heavy snow; I said that I was familiar with the boredom that engulfs one at airports, but that there is no greater loneliness than that of hotel rooms within reach of the airport, while we wait for the next day’s flight; he disagreed, because that was not the case with him, in a plane or at an airport or in an airport hotel he was never bored. And he said then: “Even when I’m not particularly in the mood for writing, I write a few poems on the plane.” Whenever I’m at an airport, I search for Šalamun’s password that would liberate me of my solitude. And I always look carefully around me until I catch sight of a sparrow. In every airport there is a sparrow fluttering its wings anxiously under the building’s glass cupolas. The official airport sparrow.

There. Our journey was good. Now I know that the two of us are very much alone. Two solitudes. When we first arrived in this city, you were thirteen, I was thirty-five, now you are thirty-three and the contemporary of the me of twenty years ago. Time melts more quickly than ice in the desert. In fact, time is not the issue, since I passed fifty, I know that everyone dies young. The question is: What will you make of your solitude? Look after yourself, drive carefully, and read clever books. Lock the house when you go out, and always take a sweater with you, the weather can change abruptly.

The clouds were the color of oil, Harun wanted to take

a few photographs of the sky. And then it began to rain.

We took shelter in a café, the one by the Russian shop

where we buy food from Slavic lands.

We scurried in and sat down at the only free table.

Now bent over a camera we look

at the pictures you’ve taken, surprised by the look of the clouds

that we’d seen in reality a couple of minutes ago.

There’s a sullen-looking type at the next table.

I didn’t notice him when we came in,