JANUARY 2011: At 6.30 in the morning I receive a phone call that an ambulance is taking my almost 90 year-old mother to hospital. Freezing rain is falling all over Switzerland. We drive along icy roads to the hospital near where my mother lives. We wait for a long time in the waiting room, the door stands open. Suddenly in a great hurry a hospital bed is rolled past us, a woman is lying on it covered in tubes. I can hardly recognize my mother. I run after the bed and shout: "That's my mother!" but the nurses hold me back. My mother dies. Now I am all alone in the world.
JANUARY 2011: I am walking my first pet dog. He is not very friendly to my mother, but I love him already.
JANUARY 2011: I ran to get the next best train from Frankfurt and pray all the way to Berne that I will get to the hospital in time to hold father in my arms one last time.
JANUARY 2011: I am grateful after a conversation with my friend Juan. Grateful for all the good things in my life and for all the people in it. I understand that one is not alone, that everyone is made of a similar stuff, that we are all together on this wondrous journey.
MARCH 2011: A full moon shines above the Rathausgasse. I sit on the window sill of my attic apartment and dare not hope that S. is still going to call.
APRIL 2011: Bea phones me. The company is going to disband.
JULY 2011: I fly across the Atlantic Ocean. Before landing at O´Hare, I can see one of the Great Lakes. This is freedom.
AUGUST 2011: Our move back to Switzerland last year was supposed to be the last but now I find myself packing boxes again: We are emigrating to Sri Lanka.
AUGUST 2011: A most fabulous Steinway D piano is mine.
AUGUST 2011: Although we've only just split up, he proposes to me on the phone. I say yes.
AUGUST 2011: Festival d'Avignon, 4:00 AM. I'm in the Palais des Papes with my friends, to see Cesena, a dance production by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. After two hours, the sun begins to rise.
SEPTEMBER 2011: Giving S. his house key back and for a split second thinking he might hit me.
SEPTEMBER 2011: My mother comes out as homosexual and introduces me that same day to her new girlfriend.
OCTOBER 2011: My cat dies after more than eighteen years. While she is dying, she lies in my lap purring.
NOVEMBER 2011: My godchild is born. He is exactly the same age as the foetus which I aborted nine months ago.
DECEMBER 2011: The first Christmas celebration with the whole family for a long time. I am at home here.