" I’m imagining your response as you read this letter —which by then will have spent a week or two sitting in this lagoon, then another month riding the chaos of the Italian mail system, before finally crossing the Atlantic and being passed over to the US Post Office, who will have transferred it into a sack to be pushed along in a cart by a mailman who’ll have slugged through rain or snow in order to slip it through your mail slot where it will have dropped to the floor, to wait for you to find it. "