We were in Brussels, and I was at the pâtisserie. I was in the apartment, with our new babysitter, watching the BBC. I was walking to buy something, something else, and our downstairs neighbor pulled her car across the street in front of me, to see if I was okay. At that point in time David and I shared a cell phone, we knew where the other was, we didn’t worry about each other, or had only just started to worry about each other a few months earlier, when I was pregnant. I remember at the end of the pregnancy I used to root through my purse to check the cell phone to see if I had missed a call, before realizing, again, that no one would be calling me, I would be calling them.

I want to go back further, more, to see how it was then, when everything was wonderful except for loneliness and, in the winter, dodgy heat. When I went to the salle de kinésthérapie and took my turn on the massage bed and watched the snow fall outside. When the man from the next building over stopped us on the street to explain that he and his wife practiced naturisme, and he hoped we wouldn’t mind. When the car was towed, and we found it.

It was as real as anything else. I can see that now. I wonder if the point of thinking and writing about past things is that by doing this you make them real, and by making them real you promise that someday this will all seem real, as well.