August 23. Waking up and for a moment still not remembering what is.

Hoping that something will get better with this crying fit now.

I know what stages I have to go through now, and where I will be – at least approximately – at the end. Can’t I professionalize it somehow? Can’t I cry more deeply, more persistently, more terribly? – It’s quite simple: when you cry, it’s so bad that you quickly stop again.

Pain lurks around every corner. One unguarded thought, one unguarded look, and the abyss opens.

It’s hard to predict if all the sights, the flight down Ninety-first Street they always rode ahead on the bikes to wait for me at the light on Riverside Drive, always talking to each other, never skipping a beat – if all those sights will always hurt so badly that I don’t know if I can go on living here, or if they’ll be good, deep, happy memories. The park benches on the promenade that they used to run on, jumping from bench to bench, or if someone was unfortunate enough to sit on one of the benches, jumping off the bench in front of them and right back up behind them. The building outside my window that they saw growing floor by floor, and that I wanted to see finished with them, and that now they won’t see finished. The final incline in Riverside Park that goes past the Elephant Playground and the basketball courts, and ends at the Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial, to where my son always went the very fastest ahead, to sit demonstratively exhausted on the bench there and wait for his sister and me to follow, which was usually only a few seconds later.

The shifts in the gravitational fields are considerable. I am now alone in New York. It’s amazing how much walking up and down a few streets with your kids can make something a home. That home is gone now. It will have to be seen how much there is to the fact that I like it here so much that I don’t want to go anywhere else. Even if the kids aren’t here anymore. When the center of gravity has shifted across the curvature of the earth. Europe is definitely not where I want to go back to. And yes, I feel that J is becoming the closest person in the world to me. But the very fact that I live on Ninety-first Street no longer makes sense gravitationally if Seventy-first no longer exists.

Two years ago, it felt incredibly painful to no longer be able to sit with my family in a cafe on a summer evening, feeling outcast from all human society, when in fact they still lived twenty blocks away.

It was a magical two years. Magical eighteen months, in fact. My happiest as a father. Every moment seemed endless, of each there would be endless more to come. Looking at it now, it’s horrifying how frantically the countdown ticked during those few months.