When I met Richard, he said, “I’m not a Cartesian. I feel no division between my body and my mind. I don’t even think my mind is confined to my brain. I think it’s everywhere in my body and even outside me.” I said, “Me too.” That was nineteen years ago. He said, “The right hand can’t give the left hand a gift.” I thought it could, although maybe you would need to be an octopus. He said, “You can’t jump into the same river once.” That was obvious.

On New Year’s Eve, you look backward and forward at the same time. Time stops, and you are in the now. You make resolutions you can’t keep—on purpose. You promise to be reborn, but you like your funk. And it’s so much easier to let yourself down than to let down another person. Richard says, “Every promise invites a change of heart,” and when he says this I feel a wave of love for him rise up, or a wave of love for the human mind and the pleasure it takes in maintaining its shape.

I’m making Richard sound like the wooden fortune teller in the penny arcade, where you slip a coin into a slot and she spits out a fortune-cookie saying. This is a compliment to Richard. The fortune teller knew a thing or two. Every promise of course invites a change of heart. Last year, when we got married, we promised nothing.

The thing you learn when you ski is you have to point your skis down the mountain. This is terrifying and true. On New Year’s Eve, gravity is suspended, and you fall upward. Actually, you always fall upward. That’s why you can float. When you ski, you hear a click like a gear shifting into place, and you don’t need to understand. All you have to do is aim the skis down. You have to unweight the downhill ski. There has to be a downhill ski, even if the skis appear to be parallel. One ski at a time, you shift your weight and edge slightly, but you have to flatten the skis for a moment before edging. You have to let the mountain take you to feel falling is flying.

Often I think about Valentina Tereshkova, who on June 16, 1963, became the first woman to travel in space. The mission lasted nearly three days. She wasn’t educated, but she was strong, and she liked jumping out of planes. We’re not supposed to want to fall, but she found it thrilling not being attached to anything.

I once visited the home of a famous novelist, who was the friend of a friend. I was thirty. My friend and the famous novelist were older. The famous novelist was making chicken soup when we arrived. She was a shy and contained sort of person. She thought she could make chicken soup with water and a chicken. I should have kept my mouth shut. The famous novelist asked how long to boil the chicken. My friend knew she didn’t really want to know. I said, “You need stock. You can’t make soup with water and vegetables and a chicken. At the very least, you need bullion and herbs.” The famous novelist stared back at me and didn’t say anything. I’m glad I didn’t mention the thing about roasting the bones. My friend was sorry she had brought me. Our friendship was falling apart, anyway. I want to tell you I never again offered cooking advice that wasn’t welcome, but I can’t tell you that. You know how resolutions work. I think about this story often. I know you’re not surprised.

When, at eight, I learned to do a back dive, I thought I could learn to do anything. It doesn’t matter I was wrong. On New Year’s Eve, when the clock disappears, you remember when you learned to float. It was the first sip of a margarita. It was that amusement park ride, where you spun around so fast you lost the outline of yourself. A chalk outline that could easily be erased. We are desperately hoping for change. We want to believe the recent past never happened, even though it is still happening. Do you remember the breakfast trays left outside the door in the little hotels in Paris where you stayed? What exactly is the float? The suspension of comparisons.

From time to time, the idea of moving to England comes up. Richard lived there until he was thirty-four. When he left, he knew it was the wrong body for his accent. If the place you are in is not a place where you can stay, you will become any age and small enough to fit in a paper boat and sail away.

When we consider moving, I suggest Edinburgh, because neither of us has ever lived there and in a TV series set there it looks cool. He says, “In the winter, Edinburgh will be cold and dark. I think we should go to Dorset.”

One summer we visited Dorset. We were hiking above a giant cliff, and Richard had a low blood sugar. While he was recovering, we stretched out in the grass and made a little tent with our umbrellas. At the beaches in Dorset, everyone was finding fossils. We found nothing. It was as if we were cursed. I said about Dorset, “We can always look for fossils again.” Richard said, “It’s better to find a fossil than become a fossil.” No argument there.

I like the smell of perfume on a neck. How do birds know there are seeds in a frozen feeder? Last year, I spoke on the phone with my former shrink. I had been reading my notebooks from the seventies and eighties, and I felt a surge of love for her rise up. I told her she had helped me. I think she knew that. Knowing me was a job for her, and she had been paid to stick it out with me. I wish I’d been able to pay other people I’d known at the time.

A few weeks ago, Richard’s brother died. He had been ill, but the death was swift, and Richard couldn’t get to England in time. A week later, on the day of the cremation, Richard flew into a rage that was easier to feel than grief. Grief for the end of another pint in a pub, another memory of riding donkeys on a freezing beach in Blackpool.

In a recent piece Richard wrote called “Pianos,” he recalls a Christmas morning when he was twelve and Roy was fifteen, and his dad gave them both record albums. Roy was given Moon Beams by Bill Evans. The family was visiting Richard’s granddad’s pub in Lancashire, a place where old pianos from pubs were being stored. Richard was stopped in his tracks by the music. He writes,

I find it hard to say how it affected me. I know I forgot about the Beatles, forgot about the jazz version of My Fair Lady I’d been given. I was simply amazed by what Bill Evans was doing with chords, or undoing, or redoing with them. For years later, I would have dreams of being in that giant space with eleven pianos. In the dreams, I play a run down the keys like Bill Evans, but my fingers stiffen, and I can’t complete it, although it’s in my head if not my hands. The other day, at my brother’s memorial, the guests entered to a track from Moon Beams. It was the first track on the album with the title “Re: Person I Knew.” In 1990, I bought an electric piano I have lugged around ever since. It’s upstairs now, and I am promising myself, again, to learn how to play it.

Guess what? He’s doing it. He’s up and down the stairs practicing the first bars of “Ode to Joy” and picking out “Frère Jacques.” It turns out you can resolve to change your life, even though resolutions are a type of magical thinking. Like a promise or a vow—the idea that if I say it, it shall be done. Why is this possible sometimes? Richard doesn’t want to die before living as much as he can. Also, learning to play the piano is a good workout for his brain.

Most of the things that have happened in my life I didn’t plan. “Text me when you get there,” everyone says. I love this quote from an interview Sarah Bernhardt gave shortly before her death in 1923, at age seventy-eight. I read it one day on Facebook, posted by Charles Busch: “Life is short, even for those of us who live a long time, and we must live for the few who know and appreciate us, who judge and absolve us, and for whom we have the same affection and indulgence. We ought to hate very rarely, as it is too fatiguing, remain indifferent a great deal, forgive often, and never forget.” If I could, I would text everyone I have ever known: “We made it home.”

Laurie Stone is the author of six books, most recently Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening,which was long-listed for the PEN America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She writes frequently for The Paris Review online, and her Substack is Everything Is Personal.