Did this a while ago and liked it. Let’s go again:

7:16am - Eyes open on the reddest couch you’ve ever seen. Thinking about Anne Carson and how I wake up from light rather than sound.

Above: Excerpt from Anne Carson’s “Autobiography of Red”

7:40am - The second of the three artists at this residency awakens. I hear her stirs in the back. I grab my camera to go on a morning photo walk alone. I get out the door before she enters the living room.

7:41am - Toothbrush in hand and mouth, she yells after me “Can I go with you?” I’m irritable from a phone call I received the night before. She knows that. She comes anyway.

8:12am - 9:19am - On the walk she checks on my emotional hangover. I say “I just don’t want to pursue it anymore.” She and I both know this will pass. She generously listens and wisely says nothing. I take no photos.

9:20 - 9:21am - The third artist is a photographer and awake now and jealous I went on a photo walk. I don’t tell him it was fruitless.

9:21 - 9:50am - We dance around the kitchen. He soaks his oats. She prepares her yogurt. I slice a zucchini as thin as I can muster and one tomato for a pseudo-carpaccio. We eat at the mosaic table out front.

9:50am - 10:40am - I catch up on emails, nobody on the project I’m working on knows I’m in Italy. Why should they?

10:40am - 11:06am - I drive the photographer to a cafe in town. I quit coffee in December but have tried it about once a week since leaving the states on July 10th. I regret it every time. Today I decide if I have a cappuccino the milk will cut it and it won’t interrupt my sleep. I will later be proven wrong.

11:06am - 12:20pm - We both sit with our cameras and our coffees and our acqua frizzante and our notebooks. I move a table to get a silhouetted shot of four chairs. [I realize now I should wait to publish this until my film is developed. I wont.] This man and I travel better together than anyone I’ve ever known. We work in silence, copying vocabulary into our notebooks as we attempt to learn languages native to our lovers. Crushes. People of Interest.

12:20pm - The first handsome man I’ve seen in the small town sits down next to us as the waitress retrieves our lain out Euros from the table. I look at the curl tucked behind his ear as the photographer packs up.

12:20 - 12:47pm - We told the artist who stayed back that we would bring her a pastry. They only have savory here. We drive to the only other spot in town and take the only pastry they have left, the brain child of an apple fritter and a sugar donut. I get gelato for the first time all summer. Meta Fondente / Meta Limone.

13:11 - 13:51 - Forty minutes of a yoga video from an Australian ballerina who’s beauty, rather than render me hopeless, makes me feel like I’m in good hands.

13:51 - 14:22 The other female artist is also multi-disciplinary and cooking is one of her domains. I walk from my grass-patch turned yoga-studio to find a dish born from white bean waiting for me. It is delicious.

14:22 - 17:42 - Three uninterrupted hours to continue research for a rewrite. 72 tabs open. I feel further than ever from understanding the scientific and political data that this script needs to be infused with. Is it about wind turbines and political referrendums? I thought it was about love?

17:42 - The two artists invite me to swim at the river. My boss is about to board a flight and I have a bad feeling. I give them my car keys and resign to stay by the computer.

17:42 - 17:47 - The Person of Interest with the foreign tongue texts that he is disappointed I didn’t write him today. I tell him I remembered he had important business meetings and didn’t want to disturb. We are both charmed.

17:47 - 19:18 - Flight attendant gets sick. The only flight off the island is cancelled. Connection Missed. New flights. New Rental Car. New Hotel. New Logo for his company? Sure, yes, be right back.

19:18 - 19:42pm - I work on a logo outside at the table. Adobe Illustrator won’t download with my hotspot internet. I mock something up in InDesign. I’m interrupted by the neighbor who has a chosen name from her 30 years living in India that none of us can remember, but it means “Surrender.” She sits with a beautiful woman in her 50s who happens to live in the far away country where my Person of Interest lives. She is his neighbor. We switch between English, French, and Italian. Her toy poodle’s name is Toffee.

19:42 - 21:05pm - The artists return from the river. I “will love it” and we “will go back tomorrow.” They brought home nosh for a light dinner. Woman Surrender made pumpkin/ginger confiture which we glob on to our pecorino and taralli. A bee jumps in. We don’t blame it.

21:05 - 21:06pm - Boss loves the logo. We text about scuba diving and rejection. I love my job. I’m not telling you what it is.

21:06 - 1:21am - Los Angeles is awake and there is coordinating to do for the week. Things have ramped up in a way that is making it no longer sustainable to work from Europe. I finally buy a ticket to the states for Sunday.

1:21am - An Associate Producer calls me and apologizes for it being so late. She thinks I’m in New York and it is just after 7pm for me. I don’t correct her and tell her I’m in work mode so not to worry. I hear the problem she is dealing with and offer to take over the entire task, which is haphazardly spread across 5 people. She is happy to let me do so.

1:21am - 3:32am - The cappuccino is where I lay the blame for these final two hours. But maybe it’s the wind turbines. Or the sugar from the jam. Or the heat. Or the mosquitos. Or the dread to part. Or the frailest leaves of life containing me in a widening happiness.