Last Thursday I went for a routine six-month checkup at the doctor’s. I would like to free myself from the medication I have been taking for nearly five years now, which makes me tired and slows me down. I want to speed up, to run, because I want to get back into my life. The doctor, a young Sikh with a pale mauve turban, said: “No, no. The medication is to prevent a heart attack.” I know, I say, but I would like to free myself of its side effects, and I’ll worry about a heart attack in a different way. He assures me that the side effects of this medication are innocuous in comparison to its positive effects on my organism. I ask: “And, in fact, what are its real side effects?” He says there are several, but none of them kill you. “For instance?” “Well, say, memory loss.” “Does that mean I could forget everything?” “Yes, but forgetting doesn’t kill you,” says the cardiologist. I ask: “If I forget everything, my whole life, if I can’t recognize my child’s face, if I forget my own name, isn’t that the same as dying?”

After the checkup, driving home, I thought: What if I’ve already begun to forget? I looked for signs of my forgetfulness. But—how extensive is my forgetting? That can’t be measured. What’s forgotten is now inaccessible because it’s invisible, because it’s in “the darkness of oblivion.” Then I felt the need to be in the company of a person with whom I had shared a lot of time in the past, so as to compare our memories of the same events. I was looking for a way of returning to my past, and so, the same day, I bought a plane ticket to Arizona. And maybe the conversation with the doctor was just an excuse for something that I had been planning for years—going back to see our apartment in Phoenix again, our first American address.

And two days later, on 16 April 2015, I flew to the other side of the continent. Over the last week, during my journey, I wrote this diary, which is probably only of any importance to me. But it might be important to you, too, because it is written for just one reader, you. It was vital for me to hide a few sentences that I wanted to say to you, here, among a mass of others. And you will find them easily. If you don’t find them, that will mean that you haven’t read it. And that’s always a possibility lying in store for every text: to remain unread. Books are lonelier than people.