I haven’t yet said that Guillermo gave me My Friends by Emmanuel Bove this week, the book I’ve been trying to track down for so long. It’s not the first time Guillermo’s given me a book I really care about, he’s given me so many, but this one arrived at the perfect moment. I read it in a night. It was a nice surprise. At one point, Victor, the main character, calls in at a pharmacy. There’s a man sitting next to the weighing scales. He’s so small that the nape of his neck is resting against the back of the chair and his legs are dangling like a pair of tights on a washing line, the toes pointing down. Victor finds him strange; he’s taken aback by this man sitting next to the scales. A woman explains: ‘Everybody knows him in this district. He’s a dwarf. Real unfortunates have pride; they don’t draw attention to themselves. There’s nothing remarkable about that man: he drinks.’ The dwarf on the block, in contrast, was interesting from that first casual smile in the street.

The stories in the ideal notebook may not cross paths any more than rivers do, and yet they’re still contained between two red covers.

Maybe I’m not in the middle of the sea, swimming onwards and getting further away, like I thought. Maybe it’s the journey, that journey made up of moments. What happens between one instant and the next. What doesn’t happen. All those stories, stories that meet and stories that never cross paths. All those moments between two covers. These covers.

This is the ending of My Friends by Emmanuel Bove: ‘Some strong men are not lonely when they are alone, but I, who am weak, am lonely when I have no friends.’ That is, without Carolina, Guillermo, Tania, Tepepunk, Julia, Antonio and Luis Felipe.

I still haven’t left because I’d like to tell you here, before you come back tonight, that maybe I won’t turn into a bird. It’s not the ideal ending, but what can we do. I won’t turn into one in the future either, because, however profound or superficial the journey may be, what’s transformed is the way we recount it. If that’s transformed, then everything is transformed. Misfortune, pain, tragedy all ought to be transformed into something else. Maybe that’s why we have to look over our shoulder, to turn back so we can be here. Looking at tragedy in order to transform it, so we can be here. Not only be here, but be here properly. Here, in this country. Here, in the apartment.

Change. Unlearning yourself is more important than knowing yourself.