Watch out: I ask questions that aren’t real, like plants made of fabric. I’m not looking for answers – questions are more my thing. After all, I like waiting. I like artificial plants like the ones you get in waiting rooms. Not to mention artificial flowers: so pretty. No, Aunt Eva, I’m not going anywhere. This feels a lot like a waiting room, look at these artificial plants and all these artificial flowers. I have a question for you: at what point did poetry become associated with love and rhyming?

At what point did two opposing ideas of poetry – the best and the worst – lie down together in the same bed? Why does the same word mean two very different things? When I say that two words lie down together in the same word-bed, I’m straying into the very worst kind of poetry. There’s nothing else for it: I should take up trova music.

Oh, trova, the bohemian bars. The cafés in neighbourhoods like Coyoacán, Condesa and Roma. A man walks in with his guitar, interrupts the conversation, sings: ‘We’re two ideas who lie together in the same word, my love; kiss me, take off your dress.’ You see the trovador’s shoes and imagine his bedroom. You imagine his faded bamboo blinds, his ashtray, his mountain of cigarette ends, his cheap wine in a mug with no handle.

As I’m writing, a plane flies overhead. Planes in the background could be seen as a kind of poetic metre. Planes are also a metronome. And as I write this I look at my shoes and see the shoes of a trovador. I ought to buy myself a cape. Pass the guitar.

A miracle: it’s started to rain. Plus, less miraculous, the neighbour is hammering on the wall. Storm and neighbour. Is the neighbour a domestic version of the storm? Storm, neighbour. Two words in height order, from largest to smallest.

Today I thought about buying wool and knitting needles so I can knit and unravel while Jonás is coming back from his trip, but then I thought that writing in this notebook is a bit like wool, because the lines are baby blue and the words, added in cross-stitch, could even become socks or a scarf or a doily, and maybe I could unravel it all and then knit it and unravel it again while Jonás is coming back from his trip.

I love you, Jonás. I know you know that, but I wanted to remind you, like with a Post-it note.

At work today I accidentally typed alphabert instead of alphabet. If we have a child, we can call it that. As my Aunt Eva says, now I have the tree in Lisbon and the books I publish at work, all we’re missing is Alphabert.