The doctor said I had to go for walks and get some sun. ‘Like an old person, walking round the block?’ I asked. The doctor, who’s in his seventies, smiled: ‘Plants, and you, and everyone else, get strength from sunlight. You’re just nicer-looking than a plant, so you might as well go outside. If you were ugly I’d suggest only going out at night so you don’t scare people, but I think it’s ok, you can go out during the day. You’ll recover in no time, just you wait. The day you stop to buy some sorbet, that’ll be it, the next day you’ll be going for a run.’

I’d just moved in with Jonás. We went to a party with his friends. We were kissing. The music was terrible, like at the end of a wedding. When I say we were kissing I mean that from there we went home, that we weren’t embarrassed and that if any of his friends had seen us at home they would have seen the same thing as at the party. It never used to be like that. Before, being around friends, around other people, seemed to alter the situation. But with Jonás it was different. Something changed. Living together made us feel more comfortable. The setting doesn’t matter. The trip, the distance, doesn’t affect that. I don’t think there’s any embarrassment or shyness between us, although, now I think about it, perhaps silence is a kind of shyness. It’s strange, at home I never thought there was any embarrassment or shyness between us.

The first time I cooked for Jonás in the apartment we’d soon be sharing, he was anxious, wanting to help. I asked him not to, to let me cook for him, to talk to me about something while I cooked. In the end he started chopping next to me. It’s rare for Jonás not to help me in the kitchen. It sounds silly, but that minor gesture encapsulates a lot of things about him, on a larger scale, and it’s part of what made me fall in love with him. Jonás can’t be in the same place as someone without helping, without offering some kind of support. He enjoys working as a team, like when he brings crosswords home for us to solve together. The very thing that made me fall in love with him is also what’s keeping us apart. Now he’s by his mother’s side. How can I bring him back?