As soon as I open the door to my friend K, I know something’s wrong and I know what it has to be that’s wrong, because I don’t believe that in a city I’ve lived in for this long, with this many people I know and kind of know, that I don’t know anyone whose life hasn’t been directly affected by Thursday. I feel as if the last few days I’ve just been waiting for some inevitable bad news. K is looks pretty today, blonde and purple-shirted in my sunny front room. This is the first thing I notice. Then I notice that we’re hugging and crying and that I have wanted to hug and cry with someone about this ever since Thursday, because it feels pretentious to do it alone, silly, like I’m wallowing in something that happened to someone else. K’s friend is missing, her name in the paper with a few facts attached. I don’t know the friend; I claim no ownership of this possible loss, just the claim of anyone who can imagine losing part of their friendship group. The interconnectedness and wide-ranging, often internet-based nature of this group means that K’s friend is a friend of other friends of mine too. We’re crying because we imagine the loss of other components of our lives too, of someone in a closer circle; and we’re crying for the people for whom that person is in the most immediate circle, and because we don’t want to think of how they must feel, not knowing. I imagine it for a second. It must feel like being swallowed whole.

I got up this morning wanting to write about Joanna Newsom’s amazing new songs I heard her play in Stockholm on Thursday night. About my drunken dawn swim in the harbour (duckweed snagged on my toes; my skin felt like marble washed clean in the rain), and about Mats Gustaffson playing with Sonic Youth, and about conversations that seemed to go on for days, filled with reference points blinking like fireflies in warm darkness and all tied up with circuitous happy reasonings that buzzed and sparked and tied themselves in knots. Now I just want to write that I am lucky; this I know for certain.