The sky is persuasive today. It doesn’t leave any space for doubt and, without mercy, has pressured away all moisture in it. Summer’s heat visualized, a blue dome hovering motionlessly over the pine trees of Ibiza, accompanied by the droning composition of crickets. Those hardy pines, that have braved storms and heat and drought and floods and construction workers and spoiled, rich tourists. Many people dislike them for exactly that, their stubbornness. Their persistence. I love them, but I love all trees. A tree cut down is murder, at best euthanasia; it hurts me physically. To me, the smell of sawdust is like the scent of blood, timberland a vast slaughterhouse.

Sitting on the terrace of our house, thriving Ibiza trees surround and comfort me, though some of them are broken: damaged by the storm that raged while you were here. It wasn’t the one that stole you from me; that was a very different storm. A silent one, wreaking irreparable havoc inside your heart and lungs. Why, oh why did I fail to notice it?

One of those trees hangs crooked, like a broken flower. It is me. You saw this happen, your mortal eyes witnessed the snapping of the trees, you sensed the storm’s brutal force. Last autumn, you filmed it and sent it to me, to show me how extraordinarily severe it was. You shared everything with me. I now regret my decision not to join you and the kids on this holiday, for what none of us knew (or did you?) was your final earthly sojourn in Ibiza. The scarred trees remind me of what I missed then and what I’m missing now. But they are just the hints of the time I wasn’t here with you, greatly outnumbered by intimations of the time we spent here together. The island can’t stop telling me about it.

You are everywhere. Casa Dieter, the house you decorated so lovingly, the sunsets you could never get enough of, the Mercat de Forada, where you used to buy stuff you’d never use, just to support the people who made them. Where we would while away Saturday afternoons, drinking cortados and not doing anything really, something neither of us were very good at, except at this tiny market in the campo on a crossroads you thought could be a backdrop in any Twin Peaks episode. A market where people sell the produce they harvest from their own garden and make unpretentious music. There we got to drink the ultimate and true Ibiza essence, the way it is supposed to be. Simple and pure happiness.

The clubs are closed because of COVID-19, which is just as well. Plenty of memories there too, darker ones, because tainted by the remote possibility of nights spent there, unslept nights, having contributed to your heart failure. Driving past a shut down Pacha I notice the memories of our thrilling parties, once our most carefree moments, are more convoluted than others.

In the garage of our house I discover a duffel bag with objects you carefully stored last October: shaving cream, a bag of ground coffee and a wooden beach-bat set that was a gift from your parents. To realize you put these away, envisioning a future opportunity to get them out for some sporty fun with our kids and your nieces, reveals yet another, brand-new level of agony. It also makes you materialize more, and I catch myself a few times, lost in a world where you still are. Expecting to see you diving into the water. On the brink of calling you, to tell you Robin walked to the beach by herself for the very first time.

To me, you might be here more than anywhere else. Nowhere were we more together than on this island. We vacationed and lived here. Countless memories adorn this Balearic island, most of them very happy, some devastating, like the dark day, a mere two weeks into our adventure-year here, when I got the call from my sister to send word my father died. Out of the blue, like a flash of lightning. Like you. That time, you were next to me, to support me in my panic-stricken grief. Now, it is you who are gone, and there is no one. In my entire life I have not felt this lonely, not even when I really was alone, just having moved to Los Angeles, away from all I knew. Is it better not to have known such intimate togetherness? It certainly makes for a more profound loneliness, I think.

What hidden meaning or lesson should I look for in the reality that the two men who meant most to me (three really, including my uncle, who perished many years ago, but also way too young and unexpectedly) left so sudden, leaving me without an opportunity for saying goodbye, for letting them know how much they mean to me? Is there a meaning, or is it merely? Just because. I prefer a meaning, but I haven’t found it yet, and fear I never will.

I knew that returning to our island would be confronting. But the devastation I feel, especially the first days here, I did not expect. My heart simply won’t stop breaking. There is no pause in the grief, no breather, something I have been able to count on the past months in Holland, where a reminder will set off the pain, but after some time it always subsides. This first week on Ibiza, the pain simply will not go away.

When the flood of memories abates a bit, another aspect of your absence reveals itself: I am now the only one to make the holiday. The chores you and I used to share, like grocery shopping, are now mine. How we relished doing this together, especially the first groceries of the holiday. This time I am dragging my feet in indecision, completely befuddled as to what I need to buy. I’m choking, and it’s not just because of the obligatory face mask. I, an unlikely mother, am now the only one left to entertain and guide the children. Every decision, right or wrong, is mine, and mine alone. I had no idea how exhausting that can be. The day my birthday comes along, I realize it has to be celebrated and I find myself contorted in an anxious determination to make sure we have fun.

So, I plan a trip to Formentera and book a hotel. When we arrive, looking for a quick and simple bite on the beach, we instead end up at a seriously overprized beach café. I rent bikes, but the distances are too long for them to be useful. The hotel is impersonal and not very nice. The food is hardly edible, and because of that MF-virus we can’t even get the overcooked and unrecognizable fare ourselves. We peer at it through plastic screens to see if we want it. Most of it we don’t, but we eat it anyway. The face masks are suffocating in more than one way, but fortunately Robin puts her comic talents to good use and, when we are at our table, places the mask over her eyes in mock despair. She makes us laugh, thank god. The next day we are served an equally inedible breakfast and it rains. The trip feels like, and probably is, a spastic flight in order not to face the bleak reality of having to celebrate my birthday without you.

Our trip is salvaged by our visit to the tiny beach shack where we had been before, with you, though it comes with the painful reminiscence I’m getting used to. The visits to those familiar places. I guess I’m still searching for you, assuring myself you aren’t there somewhere, hiding, waiting for me to find you.

The best part about my birthday are Robin and Leone, who do such an amazing job making me feel special and grateful, and the gifts family and friends gave to me to take to Ibiza. The most precious and heartrending one is a posthumous gift from you, which you give to me by way of your amazing mother. Before you died, you had been collecting pictures of me, to make into a book, once again illustrating your loving dedication. Your mother found them and decided to finish the job for you, this way conjuring up your final gift to me.

Ten days later it is our daughter’s turn. This time, more than ever before, I need to get everything right. The cake, for which I have to get a new oven because the one you and I bought together last year is broken, with Robin’s help comes out really well and the cake-and-presents ritual is wonderful. But as the day progresses the happiness collapses, not only for me, but for the birthday girl as well, culminating in her telling me in a tearful voice she doesn’t feel festive at all. Bewildered by my inability to make our broken union feel whole again, like Sisyphus I push and toil to get the feeling to a higher plane, while sensing the rock of your absence hanging off my neck.

We manage to end the day joyfully, with a moonlit dinner in the romantic garden of a restaurant in the North of the island. It’s little Leo’s warped birthday, but at least part of it feels like one. When I hit my bed, I’m exhausted and secretly glad the birthdays are over.

It’s hard work, being happy without you.