Another beautiful thing happened on this trip. I shared most of what I was doing with a very dear friend via a messaging app. Our dynamic right now is so frictionless that I can send minute observations and get a response as if she was travelling with me. That day I hadn’t eaten and found myself very hungry. I told her about it and chose to go to a vegan restaurant, partly because vegan is the cuisine I now associate most with Stockholm – it is really good here! – partly because local friends had invited me to a vegan place before and I wanted to compare and partly because a favourite diner of the friend I have been chatting with also is vegan. I found it already highly amusing to make restaurant choices with a person sojourning halfway across the planet but then she looked up what they serve and told me what she would like. Of course I ordered exactly that. When she asked me what I was having, I told her. THAT’S MY ORDER!, she replied and I just said I was eating it because she hadn’t touched it. The whole scene might have taken aout 15 minutes but was so tender and spontaneous that I remember it as if we had actually eaten together. I like sharing my immediate experiences and in particular with this friend, because her responses are always positive, curious, conducive to something. They carry joy of discovery, of life, of happiness for me having the experience, of gratitude for sharing. I never had anybody interact with me like this, don’t really understand what’s happening, go by instinct because it makes my experience better. I like sharing nice things and in this interaction I simply have the feeling that it is appreciated and makes someone else’s life better too. I cannot know why she does it though. Thinking about it now amidst the blues of winding down a great voyage, makes me realise how fragile this dynamic might be, because it depends on time and timing. More precisely it depends on the absence of other important events in each of our lives that allow us to spend time on a messenger app. I have to suspect that this wonderful tenderness is only possible, because specifically the life of my friend is not optimally filled with excitement and work which saddens me because, as a friend, I must wish for her not to have the time to go to imaginary dinners with me. And time IS essential. For these interactions to be so spontaneous and trusting you need to maintain a high frequency of communication. Only then can you carry out whole jokes, remember relevant prior information, have ongoing insider references that tie emotionally together, know enough of each other to gently tease each other and have an abundance of fresh topics to develop at any time. It might be that beyond basic sympathy, intimate relationships are only intimate because people dedicate enough time to pass the threshold of boring everyday and easy conversation topics, that do not rely on several steps of discourse. I fear that I make my friend dream, in a time where she needs to, but that I won’t be in her reality, once she manages to actualize her dreams. But I am also happy. We share photos and talk and eat together in different places, show eachother how important we are in each other’s life right now and these memories are as real and as beautiful as they can be.