"You should know our correspondence is my way of holding on to life, taking notes on it, and thereby preserving something of my - otherwise almost worthless, or even entirely worthless - existence on this rapidly degenerating planet..." Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

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Yesterday:

The husband: You OK?

Me: I dunno. Relaxed? It's a foreign feeling.

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Today I skipped the hotel breakfast because I couldn't bear the idea of eating in the basement dining room, which is antiseptic and charmless, with high small windows fringed by grass, reminding me of an underground bunker. The husband slept on. I envied him. I haven't slept well since my illness, waking up at 6 every morning without fail. That was the time I'd wake up in a hotel room in Galway, relieved to not feel excruciating pain anymore, even if it was only for a couple of hours. It was also the time the nurse would come by with IVs of steroids, antibiotics, and paracetamol.

Now the husband's watching highlights from the New Zealand-Ireland rugby game, which started at 7.45 am our time. Only a few years ago, we'd have risen early and traipse down to an Irish pub to watch the match. When we were young, like our companions last night, whom we met in a tacky Irish bar called Erin's Isle in Albufeira, in the new town, which seemed, from the interior of our Uber, mostly newish hotels and apartment blocks with families and groups of men gathered for the evening meal around ground-floor snack bars. Nearby is a strip of bars and restaurants where mostly English people hung out being obnoxious (sorry, English friends). Apparently, as we did not visit it, but were informed about same by the people we were meeting, young friends from our small town in Ireland. Anyways the bar is cavernous, the interior roofless with a stage from which a dj summoned up brave souls to sing karaoke and a Michael Jackson impersonator cavorted.

The young friends and I compare notes about our days and gossip about people "back home". Still, I felt strange among them, sober and tired, them flushed and excited, having already drunk a rake of drink by then. There have been a few such occasions on this trip. When i feel ill-suited for leisure. When I just want to hang out alone in the hotel room to read rather than, I dunno, visit the beach. When I feel like I'm impersonating someone on holiday. Restless, with a sense that things are not quite right. Like I should text the mother-in-law to see if things are alright at home. Always a sense of looming disaster. Does this come with age? I dunno.

Part of the reason for this sense of doom is the knowledge that wildfires are burning across western Europe. The day after we left the airport in Faro, a wildfire started near it. "You could see the smoke from the airplane," said one of the young friends. One ate and drank and swam in hotel pools while last-minute rescues and evacuations unfolded elsewhere nearby. When I relax, it is only because I forget, and when I remember I feel guilty. I think it's the same for a lot of people in this age, us waiting (for what?) during what is clearly an apocalypse.

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Random thought: sometimes I put off reading a book because I think it will tell me something about myself that I didn't want to know.

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