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“I’m not sure. Neither seems optimal.”

We wander through the house together, taking stock of what we’ve accomplished and what we have yet to do. Our house is a redbrick split-level. We were lucky to find a home in the 50th Ward; prices have been going up fast lately. It has two bedrooms, an eat-in kitchen, a fireplace in the living room, a canopy over the carport. Everything that can be paneled, is paneled. There is a rec room and a bar in the basement. One bathroom is pink and gray, the other is green and blue. Now that we’ve triaged Beatrice’s possessions, we are left with all her Heywood-Wakefield furniture that her family inexplicably didn’t want, and a lifetime’s worth of chipped Fiestaware, board games, dried up fountain pens, cuff links, assorted Christmas decorations and jars of pennies. Alba insisted that we throw out Beatrice’s mattress (Zach, she died on it!), so tonight we have an air mattress on the floor in the spare bedroom instead. We open a bottle of wine and sit together at the damp picnic table in our huge, mossy backyard. The lights from inside the house give us an infernal orange glow.

“How’s the tattoo?” she asks.

“Itchy. I feel like I’m molting.” I pull back my shirtsleeve, show Alba my left forearm.

“Ouch. That does look painful.” Alba smiles. “‘There’s no place like home.’”

“Home, sweet home,” I say, and I feel it, the sweetness. Alba leans her head on my shoulder. I put my arm around her, carefully. After a while, we go inside, to bed, and we are home.

Tabula Rasa

Saturday, October 25, 2025 (Zach is 24, Alba is 24)

Zach: I wake up at 3:13 a.m. and Alba isn’t next to me in bed. Then I hear the shower running, and the reassuring sound of Alba singing. I turn on the lamp and reach for my glasses. Her voice is soft; she’s trying not to wake me. She sings the same phrases over and over. I assume she’s had an idea and is trying to remember it long enough to dry off and write it down.

My notebook is under the nightstand. I retrieve it, find a pen and start to write a description of Alba’s voice, clear and quiet through the closed bathroom door, the soothing repetition of a musical puzzle piece. The water stops. Alba continues to sing.

I stopped writing just before I met Alba. So much happened then, and a lot of the things that happened weren’t things I’d want to document, just in case a notebook ended up in the wrong hands. The difficulty and urgency of my daily life made fiction seem impossible. I couldn’t summon enough concentration to read closely, much less write. I didn’t mean to give up writing completely, but time went by and I lost the habit of writing and then I stopped thinking of myself as a writer. For a while people still asked me what I was working on; then that got awkward and pretty soon I wasn’t a writer. Maybe I never had been?

Then I accidently apprenticed myself to Alba’s wordless realm of music. I used to listen mostly to rock and roll. I liked rockabilly, but I liked a lot of other stuff, too: British Invasion bands, punk, early country music, Dylan. When we moved in together, Alba set up her dad’s stereo system in the living room, and I would find her in there at all hours, lying on the carpet listening to . . . something? on headphones.

“You can play it out loud,” I told her one night. “I don’t mind.” I sat down next to her, then leaned back against the sofa.

“You probably won’t like it,” she said. She reached over and pulled out the headphone jack. It’s hard to describe the sound that filled the room. String instruments; long low stacks of notes that sounded almost industrial, droning on randomly as though some machines had formed a garage band. Then piercing notes, sustained at a fingernails-on-chalkboard pitch. Then silence. Alba turned off the stereo. “So?”

“That was intense. What is it?”

“La Monte Young, Trio for Strings. It’s from 1958. It’s kind of ground zero for minimalism. That was just a small part of it. I listen to it sometimes when I want to stop overthinking, just to listen deeply. What did you make of it?”

I surprised myself: I realized that I liked it, a lot. “You got any more where that came from?”

Alba smiled. “Oh, yeah.” Soon we were ploughing through her enormous music collection, spending whole days listening to Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, and then skipping backward to Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, then early composers like Thomas Tallis. Occasionally, Alba played her own music for me. She would answer questions if I asked, but mostly we listened together, entwined on the sofa, absorbed in the music. And after months of this immersion in sound, a part of me that had been silent woke up and I desperately wanted language. I wanted to write again.

The thing that had shut me down was uncertainty: What do I have to say? The music we were listening to was not about anything; it was a path that took me out of myself. I had been writing for other people, for their approval. What would I write if no one was going to read it?

It took time to find out. I am still finding out—I write small things that I want to keep, like Alba singing in the shower. Slowly, it adds up, my life takes shape. I have words again, and in the words I find my meaning.

Thanksgiving

Wednesday, November 26, 2025, and Thursday, November 27, 2025 (Alba is 24, Zach is 25)

Zach: Alba and I have been teaching ourselves to cook. Alba grew up shadowing her Nanna Kimy in the kitchen, so she’s not clueless, but I am practically feral. I’ve been accustomed to eating at the various restaurants I’ve worked at, but despite being in and out of kitchens for years, I haven’t picked up many skills. I can make omelets, I told Alba when we first moved in together, and I can bake a potato. But we aspire to tastier things, so we’ve been watching cooking shows, and we are slowly working our way through Beatrice’s cookbook collection, starting with Betty Crocker and on up to Milk Street. This is the big test: We are bringing pies to Alba’s family’s Thanksgiving tomorrow. It’s midnight, and we have two pies in the oven and two under construction.

“Remind me why we need so many pies?” I ask Alba, cheerfully. I love pie. We are making pumpkin, apple, sweet potato and rhubarb. “Rhubarb isn’t even in season. There are only twelve of us.”

“Everyone likes something different, and we need enough for leftovers. Rhubarb is my favorite.” She’s crisscrossing the lattice top over the apple pie. It looks wonky, but I’m sure it will taste fine. I am rolling out dough. Cook’s Illustrated recommends adding vodka to the pie dough, so we’ve been drinking screwdrivers as we bake. I have flour in my hair; the kitchen is hot and smells like cinnamon, nutmeg and burnt sugar. “I’m hungry,” Alba announces. She takes a hunk of cheddar cheese from the fridge, cuts a few pieces and pops one in her mouth, along with a bite of leftover apple. I notice her hands, wielding the paring knife, holding the cheese; her hands are thinner than I remember, and this prompts me to notice the rest of her, the accentuated cheekbones, the baggy clothes. She seems to have lost weight since dinner a few hours ago. Is her hair slightly longer? Wasn’t she wearing nail polish earlier?

I filch a piece of cheese from her, kiss the top of her head. “Alba, have you been—away tonight?”

She drops her eyes, then gives me a half smile and a one-shouldered shrug. “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice. I went to the bedroom about half an hour ago to get a sweater, and then I was gone and back again and I could hear you whistling the same tune and everything seemed the same, so I just got dressed and when I went back to the kitchen only a few minutes had gone by.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I dunno. I didn’t feel like talking about it, I guess. How did you know?”

“You look thinner.”