On the fourth day of my trip to the Greek islands, I took the evening ferry from Naxos. Two hours later I realised something terrible: I had no backpack. It had my passport, my phone charger and a book I had not finished. I remembered the bench at the port. I had left it there.
At the next island, I ran to the ferry office. A woman looked at my face and said, "Sit. Drink some water." Then she made a phone call. Nobody answered at the Naxos port. She tried again. Then she called her uncle, who works at the harbour.
Twenty minutes later her phone rang. "He found it," she said. "It's on a bench with a seagull on top." I almost cried. The bag could not travel until the morning, but a fisherman, a friend of her uncle, offered to bring it across the sea on his small boat.
At nine the next day he arrived with a big smile. Everything was in the bag. My passport was there. My charger was there. And inside my book, on page 150, somebody had left a note: "Chapter 12 is better than you think. Don't give up! Kostas."
I still don't know who Kostas is. But I finished the book that night.
Fiction note: All people, places and events in this text are fictional.