November 5. I can’t imagine how I’m supposed to get from the etudes in the piano app to reasonably complex playing, or even to halfway fluent note reading. And then it occurred to me yesterday: If each exercise is even minimally more complex than the previous one, my skills must increase over time. Since the distance between what I can do now and what is possible for me at the extreme is finite, I have to get there eventually.

November 4. From what does the right of children to not be deprived of a parent derive? Because there is no one who is so devoted to them? Perhaps also to counteract the mystical transfiguration. The ominous father is not a lost key to one’s life. He is someone who curiously looks and thinks much like oneself. I didn’t get anything like a rewarding role model from my father. (Except for the discipline of getting up at five in the morning and going to the factory, in which I joined him one summer – that impression remains). I therefore find it difficult to understand how important I – especially I – could be to my children. Perhaps they themselves wanted to go to Sweden and shrugged off the loss of their father.

Third run this week, the watch always reminds me to pace myself moderately. Tank top, t-shirt, long-sleeved shirt. It’s dark when I run. Car headlights dazzle. Body wants to gain weight, I run against it.

As of this week, back on the thirty-eighth floor. There are no official desks for our group there, but I’m the only one who still goes to headquarters anyway, and all the tables are flex, and sparsely occupied. It’s good for me to be around other people (without ever talking to anyone) – people doing strange pursuits that are somehow related to the company.

I worked in the zone for hours today and hardly noticed how time passed.

November 3. Don’t expect to find something spectacular. Notice something that, if you didn’t notice it, no one would have noticed. Make the world larger by writing it down. From this follows the need to read endlessly, to think endlessly, to notice where the world ends.

November 2. I have been reporting on America for a decade. And if it was to myself. And if the report consisted only of saying America in my own language – as if no one had ever been here with that language. Report for an audience left breathless at home – me. That is not a tenable position.

November 1. I am taciturn with myself.

October 31. On the gangway of the Baylander lies a red, lengthy plastic bag, obviously a corpse. Black hair is sticking out. Halloween.

Watched an old Tatort with subtitles. J is learning German. I try to remember everyday expressions; they have been frozen in me for years.

October 30. Set-up time for a jam session for two is now barely ten minutes. It’s not that I’m particularly confident with the technology, but I’ve cut a few swaths through the thicket. Now we play hundreds of bars of material together – it then just needs someone to edit and assemble. As it turns out, that’s a good thing to do on transatlantic flights.

October 29. I go to the company almost every day when I can. I go to the new forty-seventh floor, which still remains largely empty. Only sales people are there. Everyone agrees that this is not a pleasant crowd, probably even the sales people. If I don’t fit in somewhere with my technical musings and my high heels, it’s here. Nevertheless, I’m downright afraid to go to one of the other floors.

October 28. Nano sprints on the Hudson as it gets dark. Feeling the fast-twitch muscle fibers being awakened.

October 27. The mother of my children has taken my children away from me. I am under obligation to support the mother of my children for the sake of my children.