On a Week With Someone in the House, Missing Grown-Up Daughters, and Seeing Yourself Billed as an Author — a writer’s diary entry, 21st of October

He went back on Monday. Two weeks of work over there and then home again, which is how we do it and have done for a while now. I’m always absolutely fine about it until about four o’clock on the first afternoon.

He’d been here a week and we did almost nothing, which is the entire point of him. A long slow lunch at the place by the river with four tables and no menu to speak of. One wet afternoon given over completely to a jigsaw neither of us cared about. He fixed the gate in the rain without being asked and without mentioning it afterwards, and I only noticed two days later when it stopped catching on the gravel.

People get confused about this, I think, because I’m also the woman who writes about having built the whole of this on her own. Both things are true at the same time. I do my life by myself. I drive myself places, I deal with the préfecture, I earn what I earn, and I didn’t ask a single person for help getting here. And then somebody comes and stays for a week and puts a cup of tea down beside me at eleven without interrupting, and goes away again, and the house is quieter afterwards in a way it wasn’t quiet before he came.

Being able to manage on your own is not the same as preferring an empty kitchen. I spent a long time thinking it had to be one or the other, and it doesn’t.

Missing the girls this week as well. It’s been longer than I’d like and there’s no drama in it at all, just diaries and distance and the ordinary business of grown women with lives of their own. I keep thinking about the two of them on that beach in August with their hair going sideways and the wind taking the conversation off us. I miss them. That’s the whole of it. You don’t stop missing them, you just get better at carrying it about with you.

The poster for December came through on Friday. Three of us on it, photographs and everything, and mine is the one on the left looking faintly surprised to be there. Seeing your own face on something with a date and a venue printed underneath does something to your stomach. It has stopped being a nice email and turned into an evening that is actually going to happen, in a room, with chairs in it, and people who have made the effort to come out on a December night.

I’ve started pulling a card every morning from the Tosha Silver deck. Before anything else and before the phone. One card, read it, prop it against the lamp where I’ll keep catching sight of it all day. I’m not doing it to find out what’s going to happen. I’m doing it to find out what I’m bringing to what happens, which is a completely different question and the only one I have any say over.

The moon’s well past the half now and filling, up over the barn by early evening and bright enough to throw the poplars down onto the gravel. Five days to the full. That paper is still sitting under the pyramid and I’m starting to feel it there, the way you feel a letter you haven’t opened.