April 13. I almost didn’t dare to tell J that I had concerns about flying. J almost didn’t dare to tell me she was too unwell to fly. Great relief afterwards.

April 12. Florida canceled, rebooked. It would have been our anniversary.

Interesting the different stages I went through when I had the two red lines in front of me. I was angry about Florida at first, then I dug through the CDC guidelines and bent them to mean that, if interpreted liberally, it would be OK to fly on Wednesday. Although the guidelines say it has to be five days after a positive test, if the symptoms appeared earlier than the test, the five days apply from the onset of symptoms, and since the symptoms appeared on the weekend –.

But it did not help, it was not five days, moreover the day of onset was day 0 and not day 1. But it was almost five days. And I would be able to justify the probabilities (but I wasn’t). And we would mask up meticulously.

Here on the blog I wouldn’t write anything about the positive test, it would be too controversial. Keep everything very sparse. Just forget about the test. Just with the airline, you have to say that you haven’t had a positive test within the last five days, no ifs, ands, or buts. So with the airline, we would have to lie.

I’m not sure I would have done that for our weekend that we had looked forward to for so long. A weekend that would have had a stale taste because we would have lied our way into it. But J is feeling worse than I am and probably could not travel at all. That’s what took the decision from me. We’re flying next month.

April 11. Now we are both positive. And Wednesday we want to fly to Florida.

April 10. It is, I think, the first weekend in more than a year that work is not going on at the building across the street, with trucks beeping, elevators whirring, hammering and welding. It’s  unusually quiet here on Broadway.

I oscillate between giving up on the blog post entirely, and ditching writing right along with it, and then stubbornly biting into it again. – I look at older posts of mine and think, Hmm, not even so bad. And then I get giddy when I imagine how much more work this post needs before it even comes close to that.

April 9. Practiced piano twice, ran, gym. Wrote.

They say if I practice consistently for four years, I will play the piano reasonably well. It’s not that I can’t play at all yet, but it’s just my private music, not very variable, not connectable to anything. In four years I will be fifty-six. I have no idea where this consistent practicing will take me, whether it will have paid off. I don’t want to sight-read anything. I don’t want to reproduce anything. But what exactly the skills are that I need to enrich my music, I don’t know. So I’ll just learn something I don’t know yet. It will lead somewhere. Very vague. But four years.

April 8. Spring especially hard when it comes to the kids. Stages of pain come back that I already thought were over. Maybe because it was the last season we had together, maybe because of the blossoming of the trees and how I see them in front of me, running under those trees and on those bikes. – It is not supposed to matter so much. Children are constantly taken to other countries by their mothers, biographies are full of that.

April 7. Forgetting that you are playing the notes. I can’t believe how hard that is. If you forget it the wrong way, the very next note will be a miss.

April 6. Official Return-To-Office. You’re the one that I want is playing in the cafeteria, and the air is buzzing with chatter. Everyone made their decision of whether to come to the office, and how often, many months ago. I find it hard to believe that those who want to come three or four days a week are not reconsidering it. One must have extremely good reasons to endure one or two hours of commute a day. J. thinks it’s nonsense anyway. She hasn’t worked in an office for a long time, and doesn’t plan to ever again.

April 5, Secaucus. A clinic in an industrial park, in the featureless wasteland just outside Manhattan. It’s a shed like any other, where auto parts are sold or insurance. One hopes that the interior will give confidence, the voices, the professionalism of the employees. Yes, it’s all like that at this clinic, more so than at the healthcare corporations in Manhattan.

April 4, Plattsburgh, funeral: When it comes to family relations, I am practically face-blind.