The Italy Letters by Vi Khi Nao “Most of all, I don’t expect my love for you to go anywhere, just to give me the optical illusion that there was time or the illusion of time or the illusion of knowing myself and knowing you through desiring you.” In the form of a love letter, fragmented, a stream of consciousness. The unnamed narrator struggles to care for her dying mother with crippling debt in Las Vegas while longing for her lover in Italy. It’s sad and sensual, tender and poetic in its sentiment about the relationship that is shared through letters and phone calls, across distance and time and understandings.