8/2 I got myself a badly running nose, probably on one of the many airplanes. So bad that my entire skull seemed to clog up within hours. I got nose spray at a gas station at four on Wednesday morning, Sudafed later at the first pharmacy that opened. With those powers combined, I was able to live an almost normal life. This normal life went until four in the morning today, when I woke up with a rapidly clogging head and realized I had forgotten the nose spray in Manhattan. I’d have to get up and drive to a gas station again to get some. The night was over. And I had needed the sleep so badly. This interruption was entirely preventable, yet here it was.

8/1 We seem to operate under the assumption that a country is what its leaders do. The population is an indifferent mass, just human, doing what humans do, basically unaccountable for the course of history. You swap out the leaders, you turn a good country into a bad one, or the other way round. But everybody is all the things that a leader is. What if an entire country agrees with their leader? Or even the majority? Or even a minority?

7/31 Clapton/Winwood: Forever Man. I like the song, but I look at my wife, and we agree that it sounds strangely immature to us. How many times do I have to tell you? – Well, always of course. We can never believe that someone actually loves us, and have to be assured of that impossibility constantly. Many times a day. I’m tryna be your Forever Man – o wow, we are not trying. There is no try. There is only consider it done.

7/30 Changes. I can feel them coming. They always frighten me when they come, and I have always been thankful that they did not spare me, that I was not stubborn enough to make them go away.

7/29 Manhattan to Newburgh.

7/28 Gothenburg. Fell asleep again after breakfast, for about three hours. That makes a lot of sense, since I remain in the US eastern timezone. Walking out into the bright sunlight at what according to my inner clock is not even six in the morning was an eerie experience, as if I was somewhere in an ultra-polar environment.

9pm, back in Manhattan, J is in Newburgh. Weirdest thing to be in the empty apartment that just two days ago was filled to the brim and, in fact, far too small for the four of us. Right now you’d only detect traces of the children in the form of hair and skin particles – lots of them I would guess – but nothing is visible that suggests the past four weeks even took place.

7/27 On the leg from AMS to GOT, a woman who is traveling with three kids, the youngest barely a toddler, and all of them cranky, points to my skin and asks where I’m from. She’s from Iraq, she says, before even waiting for my answer. I’m from Germany, I say, it still seems to be most appropriate answer.

My daughter calls the Upper West Side home. Her real home. That’s the main reason why I don’t want to move away from there, even though it’s ridiculously expensive and hard to justify otherwise. I don’t want to take this away from her. I want her to have a continuing presence there.

7/26 And bringing the kids back to Sweden. Having the coolest step mom in the world and having to say good-bye to her is still better than not having the coolest step mom in the world. The logic seems to make sense to them, and they seem to be building the emotional resilience to actually live it. We are approaching a thousand pictures in our shared album of this month, and we document these last 24 hours diligently to actually reach that number.

7/25 Back at the Baylander for our final evening. Air humid, although the rain that defused the heat had already come early in the afternoon. It was depressing at first, with my son staring at his phone in a stupor. We did get into one of those wonderful times as a family later on. At home, my daughter generated song after song. It would actually be a far better documentation of this month to have her generate songs about all the crucial moments.

7/24 Back in New York. A police officer in Georgia was of the opinion that I do not have a valid driving license, an opinion which I do not share, and I will have to go to court over it. Little sleep last night as I walked up and down in anxiety and spent a lot of time asking AI about the laws. So much so that I exhausted my credits and will need to buy a more expensive subscription. In the morning I got myself a lawyer, for which there’s an app that finds a matching one. For many months nothing will happen now, and the matter will probably not be resolved until way into next year.

Flight back from Hartsfield-Jackson. Our airplane was broken and we had to return to the gate, disembark, and get on another plane. Captain extremely helpful. When there was even the slightest delay with J’s wheelchair, he would put on a worker’s vest and go down to the cargo bay himself to bring up the chair.