I sit here in the back room of this house in eastern USA, reading a letter from my very good NSW Australian mate who wrote my letter on 4 x 6 manilla-colored journal paper in scratchy black letters while sitting at a café in Tarifa, Spain. In this letter he wrote that a tourist had just wandered by and snapped a photo of him sitting at that table writing that letter just then. In reading this just now, I have had a kind of swirling, strange, small-world moment when I felt a part of me almost leave my body in some kind of floating, enlightened flash, thinking that somewhere there is a picture of this letter I am holding, a picture that represents this letter in an incomplete form, at the moment before he wrote that, when my mate might have gone on to say something else, and yet because that picture was taken there is a picture of this letter in one form, what it had the potential to be or would have been, and now I hold the letter in its final form, what it is now because of the photo and the tourist. And after that sentence where my mate tells me of the tourist he writes "I wonder if I fulfilled the fantasy of the expat writer sitting in a foreign country." Whether I can explain it well or not, there is something in that photo and in holding the letter here, like I'm holding some moment in time that was captured but could not be, a very strange thing.