Whatever my illness is, if Alicia’s hyperactivity and absences aren’t causing it, they must at least be making it worse. Her absences have been getting longer (I mean her absences from our relationship and the way she fills her time completely, without leaving a single gap; not necessarily absences that involve being out of the house). Things are postponed over and over again, and the day when we start “living together” never seems to arrive.

December 9

I’m still waiting to see the effects of the medication: if there have been any so far, they’ve been entirely negative. I don’t feel well at all, and my symptoms and complaints have gotten even worse. I’ll see how things progress in the coming days, but I still think circumstances play such an important role that I can expect only so much from unilateral work on myself. It’s like being submerged in a pool of poisonous water: if my environment doesn’t change, how can I possibly find the formula I need to overcome my condition? I don’t know why things are going this way. Maybe there’s a basic incompatibility between us that we can’t or don’t want to see. Whatever it is, time is passing, and far from being resolved or reconciled, things are reaching ever more complicated extremes. The new house, the work that needs to be done on it, and the upcoming move are all making the situation more fraught. And yet everything is subjective: no one’s forcing these time frames on us. Alicia is imposing her own rhythm on the preparations for the move, and it’s a rhythm I can’t keep up with. I still haven’t been able to put into practice my system of mentally “placing myself” in the new house and imagining how things will work there. For me this is absolutely crucial, but I don’t know if I’ll manage it now because everything is in motion, because Alicia has seized control, because the house is taking on forms that haven’t been “lived” by me (or anyone else), because this is all being forced upon me—just as here, in this house, rituals and ways of life that I haven’t had the chance to examine are imposed on me. We don’t do the things we do because of any genuine need; they’re not necessary. We do them because there’s a pattern, an abstract form, acting on us all like a supernatural force.

December 10

I don’t know how I expect to have good handwriting in my current state. Never mind, I’m carrying on with these exercises anyway, out of discipline—on the condition that they don’t require too much of it. But let me have another go, properly this time. O.K., every now and then it gets better. I’ll aim to keep it like this. Good. (How does the G go again?) G G G G G G—no, I’m not convinced at all. G G G. Good, this is the best I can manage today. I feel physically shattered, as if I’ve been beaten up by half a dozen well-fed soccer hooligans. My mind’s in pieces as well, and the days go by without anything getting resolved. I’m tired of formulating survival strategies, wedded to a way of life I have no real incentive to carry on with (almost literally wedded to—a nice unconscious play on words). Everything works asymptotically, like science and reality, two things approaching each other without ever quite meeting. The curve gets closer and closer to the straight line, but no dice.