March 28. Apart from accomplishing various tasks: empty.

To have a ring made of black metal is unexpectedly difficult. Demand has skyrocketed recently, but jewelers can’t do it yet. The production, for example from tungsten, is so difficult that you need more like a factory for it, and one-off production seems impossible.

It’s not that I don’t talk much, but only when J asks me something. I consider almost all my thoughts to be trivial, and that doesn’t change when I’m asked about them. I am only more talkative then.

March 27. The many hours I invest in music scare me. I also read junk. My thoughts are shallow. Need at least a few good pages a day.

March 26. Wanted to see Jupiter and Mercury, went on the rooftop here in Manhattan. As I got out of the door, I should have stopped in my tracks, because it was so weird and beautiful. It was dusk with all the details still present but fading rapidly, and the rooftops were as if submerged in an orange fluid. I should literally not have been able to take another step, but I did, and accomplished what I wanted. Saw Jupiter about a degree up from the horizon, after checking the direction with my compass, to distinguish it from all the planes over at Newark. Mercury had already set a few minutes earlier. J came up too, and as we waited for the elevator, the altitude reading on my astronomy app dropped rapidly. This may have been our only opportunity to see the conjunction, as clouds are forecast for the next few days.

March 25. Dreary day in Newburgh. So wet with rain and sleet that every trip outside – we only go to the diner and Aldi – seems like an Extravehicular Activity to us that can only be endured for a short time. We’re glad to be back in the house, practicing on our instruments, setting up J’s new bar cart, cutting up cardboard scraps. Three and a half hours watching Gangs of New York.

March 24. Music pieces as coding problems.

I want to extend the moments in which I lose myself in music. From a few seconds to a few minutes, maybe hours, without getting immediately caught by the limits of my abilities.

March 23. One to two hours of music a day. So easy to find that amount of time. How much of it is for the moment, and how much for the goals I want to achieve with it one day? And again, those are moments.

March 22. I felt that the onset of my father’s dementia made it easier for me. That may be, everyone said, but it doesn’t make it easier for your mother, not at all.

March 21. Tiredness after the journey like an abyss. I don’t want to be tired, I don’t want to be incapable of everything, but I am. – Text from the eye doctor. If I already see improvement, that is a good sign. It could take up to six months.

March 20.

March 19. We chose the engagement ring at a dealer in Berlin, in a back building, three stairs, the whole floor like a safe built into the house, spotless and the owner speaks the purest High German. What eventually tipped the scales for me: If something happened to J and I got nothing of her but this ring, I would recognize her in it.