½ We tell ourselves that we love each other a hundred times a day. We caress each other and look into each other’s eyes, we tell ourselves just how stunned we are to have met each other. It has never been this good. And we’re hoping for another 40 years of that. Yet all it would take is for one of these I-love-yous to not come back. When there’s a cloud in the room, all is shattered from one moment to the next, and our only consolation is that we have become so good at understanding and resolving things. Yes, we’re in it for the rest of our lives. But each I-love-you feels necessary, and fragile, and precious.

1/1 Back from Puerto Rico to Manhattan, 12 hours doorstep-to-doorstep.

12/31 I’m like a dog. Every year, in retrospect, was the best year ever. This one was great in particular because I feel traction again in my writing, and traction in music.

12/30 What would actually change if all books were added to the searchable universe – if I had not just the ability to search that one book I have in front of me, but if any search would pass through all books that were ever written, and I would find things in books that I did not even know existed. How much of an actual intellectual gain would that bring? Or how much justice to the forgotten authors? Doesn’t it take more to be initiated to an author than finding a sentence of theirs?

12/29 Played the Bach menuet from start to finish for the first time, though very very slowly and with lots of fits and starts. Not entirely impossible I’ll be able to play it for my mother’s birthday in three weeks.

12/28 Scuba diving in the morning. Embarrassed to say it, but it lacked all of the excitement since J couldn’t come along, she’s still down with a cold. Also, I’d have to be very bored otherwise to have room for something as exotic as scuba diving. Okay it was also great. Almost transparent fish swam between our hands, because, as our instructor said, once you’re a diver, you’re just one of them. Also, saw an angelfish, of which I’d learned that they mate for life. I imagine that difficult when you don’t have an address of each other or even a phone number. – I was better at navigating the three-dimensional space this time, controlling my buoyancy. The instructor does not want to see me back in this discovery dive for complete beginners next time, which I already did last year. I’m supposed to do my diving certificate next, which, after doing the theoretical part at home, I could get done here in as little as two days on our next visit.

12/27 Being in solitude with J is just as productive as being actually alone, if not more. Except I should have known by now that in such a time of solitude, I can only focus on a single thing that I always wanted to do, not several, and not assume naively that I could also start something entirely new just because there is an endless amount of time. There is not.

12/26 Having finished one book, I rarely know which one to read next. I’m curious about many, but I do not know which one will steer my thoughts into any kind of natural progression. I should make it a rule then, to move in all sorts of unrelated directions, always reading books that seem wildly unrelated to what I’m currently working on. Let thoughts materialize from sources that were not experienced with any such purpose.

12/25 We started talking three years ago and we haven’t since stopped. And laughing. All the time. – Wrote for an hour today, practiced piano for about the same. Finished Eco, plunging into chaotic thoughts about books, paper and digital. Pacing up and down in the evening.

12/24 Like last year, it is not until the morning that we see where we have come. No, not quite true: past midnight, I can already see Canopus low above the horizon, making it very clear just how far south we are. This, plus the moon very high, but its terminator strangely tilted towards the horizontal. This, and the razor edge where sea and sky meet, always at eye level. We sleep till noon, and then we only get up from loud banging at the door, when the house keeper, at the request of the owner, brings us styrofoam boxes with Carribbean food. We are glad because we don’t even need to go shopping today.

The strangeness of this first day. We really, really, really don’t need to do anything, a void that gets flooded immediately with all the good things we want to do, the reading, the writing, the music, and not even counting the pool and the sun. We decide to be really strict about not doing anything at all, just so we can find our bearings.