How can one not enjoy life, with its trees, its seas, its people! Let’s talk about people. About that girl who grabbed my hand on the train when I was around twelve or thirteen. I didn’t know her at all, we had simply exchanged glances, and she let her hand slide down the railing until it found mine, without breaking eye contact. And just like that, she got off at the next stop and I never saw her again. It left such an impression on me that, even now, ten years later, I still remember her.

That trip never happened either — yes, the one I said I would take, crossing the Balkans. There’s still time, who knows.

I went to Sicily and discovered a new universe. Sicily meant closing many other doors — Sicily is like that, it demands sacrifice — but it also offered reward. In my memory, those two months of walking it, driving through it, testing it, feel no more than a mirage. Some guy once said that whoever understands Sicily will understand the world, and I second his words. Everything is in Sicily: everything that didn’t happen, everything that did, what was missing and what fulfilled us.A meteoric city like few others. “Palermo is alive,” another guy said. There are cities that move and others that don’t, and Palermo is always moving. Naples too.

I walked through the streets of Naples on the days when the Azzurri won the scudetto and I found a city with a kind of religious fanaticism. I found dirt, chaos, intensity. A guy on a motorcycle, no helmet, speeding down one of its hills with one hand, while holding a baby — also without a helmet — in the other. A man who threw us out of his bookstore because he was sick to death of tourists who didn’t appreciate literature and only wanted to take pictures. And I wanted to tell him no, that I was different, that I wasn’t just doing tourism, I was traveling differently, and yes, I believed in literature. But as those words were still forming in my head, he had already thrown us out into the street.

Few situations have ever felt more unjust to me. To be condemned for my own faults feels fair enough, but books are one of the few things I have always venerated with the deepest respect. I felt wronged — and looking back, all I can say to that bookseller is: you are a son of a bitch.

So I never finished reading the back cover of the book I was holding when he kicked us out, just as I never finished so many other things.

I never finished The Aleph by Borges, the copy my friend Javi lent me, because by the end of my season in Slovenia I had to return it half-read. I never finished the Camino de Santiago, I never went all the way up to Lykavvitos hill in Athens, even though I lived 5 minutes away from it.

It’s in that absence that one can either dwell endlessly or simply write it down somewhere unimportant and turn the page.