I was very surprised to get your letter last week. It arrived on a night I was going to see a movie with a girlfriend. She was calling me that night, Doris is her name, saying hurry up, and can you bring those caramel candies? This time I’d packed a box all for her so she wouldn’t have to keep interrupting me during the best parts for a candy. But then I saw your letter hidden below my water bill. And I saw it was a Greek address. No one writes me from Greece. I held the letter in my hand for a very long time, and I thought about not opening it. You understand that, don’t you, Milos? It’s not about you, but that’s a lie. It is about you. It’s about so many other things too.

Oh, Milos. It’s all so strange considering these things at the end of a life. At the end of a life you don’t have anything to do besides put on another black outfit for another funeral and get annoyed at your friend who asks for caramel candies twenty times in a movie. You can lay down fully at the movies now. Has that come to Lefkada yet? A person could move into a movie theater here and sleep in such warmth and security.

But yes, your letter. You may be surprised to hear this, but I haven’t spoken a word of Greek since I arrived in America. I was twenty when I came here. Now they say forty is the new twenty, eighty is the new forty. They want me to live forever, but it’s all very tiring. At twenty, I felt so old. But I felt, this is my fresh start. Fresh starts can be deceiving though. I suspect you know something about that.

It gave me a deep pain to force the Greek back to read your letter. I said, just this once, I will do it. I saw your name on the outside: Milos Christakos, plain as day. But even before that, I knew it was you. I thought, what have you waited for? As much as it shames me, I did want to hear from you. Even after everything, yes I did.

Well, you know what you wrote. You wrote to locate you on the Facebook. That messaging is easier that way. Faster. You asked what has happened in my life. To tell you ta panta. Everything. You underlined that with a double line. Ta panta.

You wrote that you think of me. That you have always thought of me.