Terse text from home: "Dog is better." Phew.

//

Apparently, after the euphoria of first days, we have entered the inevitably turbulent stage of the holiday. We eat at odd times, or nothing at all for hours and hours. Plans go awry, usually swerving on the husband's whim, abetted by my complacency. He's always on the phone with clients and solicitors; each and every one urges him to enjoy his holiday.

At some point we'll argue, part ways sometime after midnight, wander on our own looking for the hotel. (Once, in Rethymno, he arrived on the back of a moped, after drinking cans of beer with locals in a municipal garden.) We'll go to bed dyspeptic and grumpy, and wake up wary, unsure of the wisdom of being in each other's unmediated company for so long. I watch an ant wander in circles around the kitchenette sink, maddened by ghostly traces of a long-devoured pomegranate, and try to not metaphorise the scene.

Eventually a detente is negotiated: a series of minor, often unspoken agreements and adjustments will occur, to mutual benefit. Intentions, if not desires, begin to sync. Marriage is a daily renewal of not only love but also of vows, writ in mundane acts.

//

Meanwhile I write so much in this diary. I am compelled to send postcards not only from Lagos, but also from the interior of my mind, a country that is often unknown to me until I map it with language, setting down those images into converging and intersecting lines which will convey, or so I hope, the various layers and depths that constitute the world from my point of view.

For now that world resembles a de Chirico painting from his "metaphysical" period, in which the sun casts deep shadows across an empty oneiric cityscape haunted by eerie classical figures. Dreamlike and lonesome, suspended in mystery.

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