It was a Thursday. Not a particularly remarkable one — that was the joke for months afterward, that the most important Thursday of either of our lives had been disguised as an ordinary errand. I was supposed to meet a friend. He was late. You were not.
I had been holding a book I was not reading. You asked, with what I now know was your normal voice but at the time felt like a small private weather system, whether the chair next to me was taken. It was. I said no anyway. I have been saying no anyway ever since.
We talked for forty minutes. We talked for two hours. I have, in the years since, given up trying to reconstruct the conversation; what I remember is the way you tilted your head when you were thinking, and the moment in the second hour where you started a sentence with well, the thing is — and the world quietly rearranged itself around me.
The first thing I did, on the morning after, was a small thing I would do again every morning for the rest of my life. I counted. Not deliberately. Time had simply rearranged itself around a new origin point, and I had been given, without asking, a new way to measure.
There is something old-fashioned about counting days. Lovers used to do it on calendars, with a pen, before the calendars learned to do it themselves. I am not sure the counting is for anything other than itself. To say: we have made it this far. To say: we have made it further than that.
What follows, opposite, is the count as of this writing. By the time you read it, the count will be wrong. That is the point.
An incomplete enumeration. I will keep adding to it on the inside back cover.
It has been six weeks. Six. I keep wanting to write that down so that I will believe it. I keep failing to.
I am writing this not because anything is wrong, but because everything, for once, is not. I have noticed, in myself, a quiet new instinct — a small turning, every time something happens, toward you. The instinct arrived without my asking. I think you put it there.
On the days the world is too loud — and I know there will be days like that — remember this letter exists. Remember I picked you on the quietest morning, with no audience. I would pick you again.
I will pick you, again.
New letters added as they are written. Both of us may write them.
For when the words on the page are not enough. Press your thumb to the spine and listen.
I have never been a good photographer. I take too many; I look at them too rarely. But this year is different. I have started to feel, around the edges of every ordinary day, the small private suspicion that — this one, also, will be missed later. So I photograph it.
The plates that follow are not arranged chronologically. They are arranged by the order in which I miss them. The Corniche first; the kitchen at Eid second; the garden in December; the night the highway emptied. I will keep adding to this gallery for as long as we are accruing days.
Each plate has a caption. Each caption has been written twice — once when the photograph was taken, and again now, when I have had longer to think about what it was.
A bell, in this house, is not for emergencies. It is for the smaller, more important kind of signal. The thinking of you kind. The the kettle is whistling kind. The look out the window, please kind. There is no other bell like it; there could not be. It is private to us.
On the page opposite, the device is sketched as it presently stands. It is extremely simple. A title. A message. A small bronze button. The bell rings on the other person's phone, regardless of where in the world that phone is. It rings softly. We can mute it; we never do.
Below the device, a log of recent rings. Yours, mine. They are not very important, considered one at a time. Considered together, they are the sound of a house being lived in.
We have not bought a house. We have not signed anything; we have not picked a city. And yet, somewhere in the way we talk, we have started to build one. The conversation is, by now, well underway. The plans are in two languages and several handwritings. The materials are mostly small.
On the page opposite, three elevations: this year, the next five, our forever. Each column is a wall of the same house. They are not separate buildings; they are different aspects of the same one. We add to them constantly. We finish, occasionally.
Nothing on these walls is binding. Things move between columns. Things get crossed off, then added back. The point of the document is not the document; the point is that we keep writing it together.
This volume continues — every letter, every photograph, every ring of the bell adds a page. The book is not finished. It will not be.
Begun on the morning of 5 October 2023, somewhere between a
coffee shop and an apartment with a balcony.
Set in EB Garamond; ornaments in gilt;
binding by hand. Both languages, by mutual agreement,
of equal weight.