I haven’t seen the dwarf on the block for a while. I wonder what he’d turn into. Perhaps a lynx. If the cat turned into a person I think he’d like to be my boyfriend. He’d be jealous, unreasonable. Right now he’s lying on top of me, with two paws in my lap and the other two on my shoulder. His eyes are closed and he’s purring. It even seems like he cares about me.

I dreamed about Ernesto, my ex-boyfriend, and his dad. The three of us were in a restaurant, having lunch with a strange character. This person wasn’t very entertaining, but he was making all kinds of efforts to win our favour; an unpleasant, obnoxious man, all in all. Ernesto’s father, through facial expressions, gestures, movements and comments, delicately shielded us from him. Ernesto got up suddenly to go to the toilet and didn’t come back. I felt comfortable and protected by his father. Just like when he was alive, I thought when I woke up.

Dreaming about Ernesto’s father, whom I loved so much, made me feel strangely looked-after.

Julia gave me a book about small, almost imperceptible islands. It reminded me of my dear, elegant friend on the block. The first island in the book:

Lonely Island (Russia)

Russian Ostrov Uyedineniya ‘Solitude Island’

20 km2 | uninhabited

Loneliness lies in the centre of the Kara Sea in the northern Arctic Ocean.

An island has another scale, other rules of growth; the sea decides the pattern of an island’s development. The island that’s twenty kilometres from end to end, and is called Lonely Island, carries the tautology in its name.

An island is like someone who’s deaf. A space with which communication is difficult. Being deaf, unable to hear, is a way of being an island. And in that way, like an isolated phrase, badly communicated, not listening to the others, I’ll say that I don’t know the whole of the national anthem but I know entire Juan Gabriel songs off by heart. ‘Siempre en mi mente’ could be the anthem for this apartment. Always on my mind.

To write is to maroon yourself on an island the size of a page.

I thought about the famous hypothetical game about the island. The ideal island to which you can take books, records, friends, as an exercise in choice.

When I was a teenager, my father helped me change the toner cartridge in the printer. He did a test. Thinking he should write something to try out the printer belonging to his daughter, who was studying communication at university, who liked reading, my father wrote the first thing that came into his head, in the middle of a blank sheet of paper: ‘A word all alone’. But that word isn’t alone, dad. And what’s more, that line you wrote is a good snapshot of you. You’re never alone. And yet.