I went back to our apartment to bring some essential things that we’ll need in the hospital, some clothes, toothpaste and a toothbrush, some fruit, in case she gets hungry. I picked up the mail from our mailbox. On the way to the apartment I opened a package in which there was a book, I leafed through it briefly and read a sentence from the first paragraph: “All our problems are a consequence of our not being prepared to stay inside.” I walked along the corridor through which she had gone in the opposite direction the day before yesterday. Our lengthy corridor. From the elevator to our door the distance is the length of two football fields. Once, weary, I stood at our apartment door, having set off on an urgent errand in town, but when I looked along the lengthy corridor, I lost the will, I couldn’t face the long walk to the elevator, so I turned around and closed the door behind me.

It was less than two days since I’d been in the apartment, but when I went in memories had me reeling, first of the previous morning, and then of all the days spent here, because every object in the apartment reminded me of the motion of her hand putting it in that place. I took a shower and changed. On the computer I tried to find out what household maintenance tasks needed attending to. I know nothing about that, she did it all. And my system soon collapsed in the face of all those passwords! I’d now need to reconstruct our reality from scratch, or would it be better to wait for Sanja to remember everything? I stood in the kitchen thinking about Saturday morning, before she complained about a pain in her arm. I had been about to make coffee for the two of us, I had poured the water into the machine, spooned finely ground coffee into the filter, all I had to do was to press the button on the coffee machine. I did that now, and the sound of bubbling water drove the silence out of our room. I made coffee for two. I poured mine into a glass cup, but what to do with hers? And I don’t know how to emerge from that Saturday morning. I want to freeze the time in my memory, to keep us there in the room, to prolong for as long as possible the peace in which two people are getting ready to drink their morning coffee. I want to stop everything in the state before her stroke, before the pain. We won’t leave the house!