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other, perhaps also got scared of each other; at any rate we were suddenly moving in different directions. I was twenty-nine, and so was Kosti. He went on the yearlong trip to the Orkney Islands by himself. It was a trip we’d planned to take together.
    â€œI’m not coming with you unless you’re willing to at least try to have a child with me,” I’d said. Because I still didn’t think he was capable of leaving me and I didn’t want to accept the seriousness of what had come between us: my life, my entire life.
    He left. And a year later, the boy was born. Kosti didn’t contact me that entire time. Not until he had returned from his trip did he call, and I told him about the boy. After that, he wrote and called a few more times, more and more rarely. Then, silence. I never went looking for him. He’d moved to another part of the country, that’s all I knew. The way I looked at things then, I viewed him as having mortally wounded me, first and foremost by not being the father of, I almost want to say, our child. He’d left me and my life now belonged to the boy, now it was the two of us who were inseparable. I often found myself thinking pointless things, such as that if Kosti had been the father of my child, he would have been healthy. It was as if my mind refused to complete the thought that if Kosti had been the father, the boy wouldn’t have existed at all. I knew, technically,that the boy had a father, and that Kosti wasn’t him. But I never truly accepted that reality. The way I saw it, the boy was fatherless. That was Kosti’s betrayal of both of us.

December 2
    I’d become a mother, but my child was locked away in the hospital and couldn’t come home with me; he cried incessantly day and night; he almost wasn’t a real child, and I was his mother. That’s how it was. For one year my boy lived in the hospital and I was there with him, sleeping on a cot in his room the first few months, living inside his crying as if inside a cave of hoarse, exhausted crying. Back then, no other world existed except for the one contained inside the hospital’s red bricks. I had to subscribe to that world and its routines, routines that made the days so similar they eventually seemed like one, like a simple, rhythmic pattern repeated again and again, a ticking without variation that kept the world going. No suffering or pain can resist being swallowed by a hospital’s regulations and stubborn reasoning. An ingenious protective net of cleanliness and restraint is perpetually suspended over the abyss. It wasn’t until I was locked up inside this alien order that I began to understand what the pedantic rhythm in my own life had been about. You can think of order as a spine or a corset; that’s how I used to think about it myself. Now I know that its primary purpose isn’t to hold things together. It is to shut things out, to repel and shut things out. That’s what it’s for.
    I sat there with my child, enclosed by the hospital’s vast order, surrounded by the small cell filled with my tears and the face of my child. I felt as if I were traveling on board a spaceship drifting off course through the universe. All connections to my old life – my history, my memories, my sense of context – had been severed. After three months, the doctors convinced me to move back home. I had to get some sleep, they said. I had to get my life back in order.
    â€œI don’t have a life without the boy,” I said. “I have no life to take care of.”
    Nevertheless, I staggered out of the hospital and my sister came to bring me home. She’d been watering my plants, opening my mail, and paying my bills while I was gone. Now she led me into town, led me out under the incredible, enormous sky, and all the way to my small apartment, where my old life lay wrapped up, waiting for me. She’d prepared a welcome-home dinner and bought