I met Jonás through Tania. They were good friends at secondary school. They hadn’t seen each other for a while, but Tania was there for him when his mother was dying. A few days after the funeral, Tania invited Jonás round for a coffee. The doctor had said I should go for a walk every afternoon as part of the recovery process. As I strolled along on that sunny afternoon, I thought about how good I felt, how I was completely cured. I decided to buy some mango sorbet and ring my friend Tania’s doorbell. Over the intercom, she invited me up. That afternoon, the three of us chatted. Jonás loved the mango sorbet. We moved in together one month later.

Nobody knew if I was going to wake up. I didn’t know either. The first thing I heard when I did wake up was one of the nurses singing a Shakira song. One of the nurses pushing my trolley was singing a Shakira song to the other. This can’t be death, I thought. I knew I’d come back. Back to life. Back to life and its magnificent vulgarity. Awesome, I thought, here I am. I opened my eyes.

Walking down the street today I came across this Post-it note: ‘Marta, a ham and chicken sandwich with no onion. Miguel, a milanesa sandwich, all the trimmings, no mayo.’ The man who wrote that Post-it probably doesn’t like Shakira. Which is a shame, because that song is another great reminder.

Jonás leaves for Spain with his family soon, and I’m staying here in the apartment. With our black cat, our Telemachus.

I said I’d discovered sex with Jonás. Does it relate to what I’ve been through, or to what he’s been through, or to a combination of both? Does it relate to no longer fearing death? Or to our age? What does it relate to, this fact of two people deciding to experiment in ways they haven’t before?

Is it possible to stop being afraid of death? I mean, is it possible to stop completely?

This time I searched online for ‘an ideal notebook’. I found this question on a forum: ‘What would your ideal notebook be?’ And the response from a teenager: ‘One with a hard cover, and dividers for eight subjects. It would come with coloured pencils, a calculator, a rubber, a pencil sharpener, a ruler etc. You could stick photos on it or leave the cover blue (like the sea).’

I liked this marine parenthesis so much that I brought it over here, like a dog carrying the neighbour’s ball in its mouth. And tell me, isn’t Mexico located in a kind of marine parenthesis?

You know, Jonás, I was thinking about our conversation at dinner the other night. Phrases and their animal nature. Maybe we could start a zoo, and catalogue the different species of lines.