Every other Wednesday since November 2018. One hundred and forty-two essays, give or take a few I deleted on principle.
I have been ending my workday in the middle of a sentence for sixteen working days. It has been a small disaster and a quiet revelation in equal measure. Here is what changed, and what I am keeping.
It is two rooms wide, three deep, and has, by my count, eleven hundred books. The owner, Inês, says she has not added a shelf in nine years. Things she throws out, things she keeps, and what she said when I asked her about Joan Didion.
I bought the cheapest hardback I could find in February and have, with two skipped days, written one page in it every morning. The handwriting is bad. The thoughts are slightly less bad than I expected.
March was a difficult month at the desk. I wrote three pieces that did not work, in three different ways, and I think I now understand why. A short post-mortem of the pieces that never went out.
Hannah, who is older by a year and a half and braver by a margin I have not yet calculated, asked me at lunch what I would still do if no one ever read it. The honest answer surprised both of us.
I have read it three times. The first reading was an undergraduate skim. The second was a hurried revisit at thirty. This third reading, in March, in Portuguese with a dictionary, was something else entirely.
Six days in a borrowed apartment with too few of my books and none of my pens. A small catalogue of the things I missed and the one I did not.
In which I defend the gradually disappearing habit of writing to one specific person — at length, by hand, knowing you will not see them for at least a month.
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