At 7:00 a.m., before I set off to work, I make her coffee; she prepares my lunch, goes back to bed, and sleeps for another hour. She drinks her coffee when it’s cold. For the rest of the day, until I come home, she invents jobs for herself as a refuge from loneliness. For her forgetfulness, it’s very important that everything is always left in the same place, so that she can find things more easily. But, to fill the time she spends alone, she moves objects around the apartment and rearranges the furniture. Today she sent me an email. Subject: Call me. And underneath, an explanation: I don’t know where I’ve left my phone. I called her, she set off toward the source of the sound and so found her phone. Last year something similar happened, only the roles were reversed. She was in Sarajevo, I couldn’t find my phone, so I sent her an email asking her to call me. And she did, and the sound came from the washing machine, where I’d put my jeans I had earlier spilled coffee on. She called in time, so the phone wasn’t drowned in water and detergent. That’s so simple: she phoned me from a different continent to save me from my forgetfulness. It’s a shame there isn’t a machine that discovers forgotten events and returns them to the memory.

On my way to work, a text message from her arrived on my phone: “Do you remember when we were children, little girls wore crocheted collars on their school smocks . . .” It was early in the morning, and she was in the depths of her childhood.

Two hours later she called to say: “I’ve ironed all your T-shirts, and I kissed every one.”

And here I am, I can’t stop thinking about those kisses, as though a hundred cats were tickling my soul with their soft paws.