The written loom

After… after… after… and a dictionary

After a day that smelled of sun and asphalt.. one of those Athenian days that lick your soul with the tongue of heat..
After a visit to the dentist, because the body always finds a way to ask for care when everything around it flickers..
After an epic, stubborn pain that only slightly bowed before science and patience..
After a visit to my beloved bookbinding teacher, in that workshop that isn’t a place but a stretch of time. A different kind of time, fragrant with old paper and glue, like something passed down from our grandparents’ world, when everything had hands and meaning..
After the great joy of meeting another postcrosser.. yes, we are multiplying, like tiny words in a letter finally finding company..
After the supermarket, the metro, the standing still, and all those sun-kissed tourists who somehow tanned more than I ever could..

I returned home. And collapsed. Literally.. Like a piece of paper finally allowed to rest..

And now.. having woken up.. I held in my hands a gift.. The kind no one could imagine to give me .. except myself.. 
Because after everything, I deserved it..

A dictionary. English to English.. Not new. Not modern.. But from 1972..

Like a coat well worn, still carrying the scent of words.

The first thing I did was to look up the words bookbinder and calligraphy — as if meeting again the very heart of my story..

And there was more..

Someone gifted me an old-style print of the Athens Academy, a copper engraving of columns rising into the sky, Lycabettus in the background, marble and myth dancing quietly in the air.. 

A scene almost fairytale-like..
A moment captured in timeless ink..

And what touched me most:
Among the first pages of the dictionary, I found a section titled “The Corpus” — describing how five million words were processed by a computer in blocks of five hundred words each, reorganized, classified, analyzed.

A feat no human team could have accomplished with such tireless precision..
That long before artificial intelligence, machines were already helping us see the heart of language — not through meaning, but through rhythm, structure, and alphabetical grace..

Because for some of us, dictionaries are not tools.. They are places.. Observation towers.. They are where words strip off familiarity and once again gain body, shape, sound, meaning, and time.

Dictionaries are where language breathes..

I love dictionaries.. And I love it when they find me — because we don’t really find them.. They choose us..

And the most wonderful part?
The new postcrosser I met?
He’s a professional interpreter.
He speaks words.. I write words..

Coincidence?

Maybe..

But I like to think it was a wink from the universe.
As if it whispered:

“Go on. You’re on the right page.”

Tatiana,