Dear Javier,

I've been back home about a couple of months now and I was sitting and thinking about how mighty odd it is that you left before me and that you never told me you were leaving either. I thought I mentioned that I would be leaving in about a month and I thought that if you knew you were leaving at the time, you would've told me. I hope nothing bad happened. I started googling you a little bit just to see if I could find anything, a sort of clue to your disappearance. My mum thinks that you're one of those children born in the prison cells in the dirty war and you were adopted by the people who killed your parents. I got into deep research about that and I started reading about this guy called Alejandro Pedro Sandoval. With the internet you can really document everything and thats what he did- he has a blog (in spanish, though) about the entire episode when he didn't know how to feel about his supposed parents being murderers and then how he acquired a whole new family but he didn't know them. Its interesting, but since I have to google translate it, a lot of the stuff gets lost in translation and sounds really strange. Like this sentence for instance- "that some of them I am coffee and is as of we knew of cradle to cradle" which is the google translation of "de con algunas de ellos me siento a tomar café y es como si nos conociéramos de cuna a cuna" makes absolutely no sense to me. That's sort of the sad thing with languages- its really really hard to translate sentiment. It makes me sad when I think about it because I may never be able to read Neruda in the language that he wrote. (Not that I read Neruda, or Marquez but still.)
Which makes me think.. did you ever finish reading War and Peace? Thats another reason why I'm kind of inclined to believe that you were one of those war kids. The speed at which you were reading that book was rather unhealthy.
I went back to the café to see if you had left any contact number but noone could tell me anything. Not even Adi, who I never said goodbye to properly because I thought I'd return the next day.
I sometimes wonder whether I just imagined you- and you were just this figment of my imagination that I'd developed as a sort of survival mechanism in Paris. I'll explain- I would always come running straight to Le pain quotidien the second I felt even a little bit homesick. I'd listen to Rashid sing and you bicker during which you guys would feed me those delicious pain au chocolat and I'd pretend to do french homework while secretly just feeling happy about being fed lots of croissants for free. Haha. It seems like a sort of imaginary friend I'd have- a friendly South American waiter who gives me free food. Mmm those croissants were delicious too. I remember the first bag you gave me. (I still can't believe you thought I was twelve, by the way. I thought you were twenty though, I should add.) Yes, back to the bag. I went home and ate it ALL at once. The escargot with the custard filling and the little raisins, the gaufre sucré and the baguette. ALL at once. And then I plopped myself down on a chair with a satisfied little grin. I would have lay upside down like cookie does when she's really full, except that the floor was kind of dirty.
And for the record, I never used to take you up on your offer of coming on sundays to get bread because I didn't want you to think that I was just using you for the food. Because I wasn't.
Anyway, I hope you did reach home safe and that you fixed what you had to. I'm still trying to figure out what to do from here on, but it might lead me back to Paris. I hope it does. Maybe if you're still at Le Pain Quotidien, I'll drop by.
much love,
me.