We are surrounded by sealed things. Sealed appliances, sealed software, sealed arrangements between people that nobody is allowed to open and look at. The seal is sold to us as convenience and it is, mostly. But it teaches a posture: things arrive finished, and when they stop working they leave whole, and the interior of everything is somebody else's business.

Repair is the opposite posture, and it turns out to be load-bearing.

That winter I fixed the kettle, then a lamp, then the zip on a jacket I had worn maybe twice because the zip was broken and taking it to a tailor felt disproportionate. Then — and this is where it stops being about objects — I wrote to a friend I had let go quiet for three years, for no reason either of us could have named. The letter took longer than the kettle. The mechanism was harder to see. But the gesture was identical: open the thing, look at what actually failed, resist the story that it failed because it was always going to.

Most of what breaks does not break dramatically. A contact oxidises. A thread wears. Someone doesn't reply, and then the not-replying becomes the easiest thing in the room. Repair culture — real repair culture — is just the habit of noticing early, while the fault is still ninety cents.

The jacket works. The friend and I had dinner in March. The kettle is loud now in a way it wasn't before, and I have decided to hear it as purring.

I had the top berth. Below me a man of about seventy read a paperback with the cover folded back, one thumb keeping his place, the way my grandfather did. We never spoke beyond buonasera. At Bologna he was replaced, silently, by a student who slept in her coat.

What I keep from these trips is never the destination. It is the stops in the small hours — Pescara, Termoli — stations lit like aquariums, one man with a trolley, the recorded announcement talking to nobody. You see a town with its face washed, before it has decided what to be for the day. I find it almost unbearably tender, and I have stopped apologising for that.

Somewhere after Foggia the light started. Not sunrise — the thing before it, when the window stops being a mirror and becomes a window again, and the sea arrives on the left like something remembered. I went to the corridor. The student was already there with two paper cups of coffee from the machine, and she handed me one as if we had agreed on it the night before.

Bari at seven smelled of bread and diesel. I walked from the station to the old town with my bag on my shoulder and my back complaining about the berth, and I was — there is no better word for it — arrived. Eleven hours is not what the journey costs. It is what it is worth.

Ci torno ogni anno e ogni anno la casa mi restituisce una versione precedente di me. Nel cassetto del comò c'è ancora una scatola di conchiglie catalogate con l'etichettatrice, l'opera di un bambino che credeva che nominare le cose bastasse a tenerle. Sul muro della cantina, le tacche a matita delle altezze: io, mia sorella, due cugini che adesso vivono a Berlino e chiamano casa un'altra lingua.

Il tempo, qui, non passa: si deposita.

Quest'anno ho notato per la prima volta che mio padre sale le scale tenendo il corrimano. Non ne abbiamo parlato — non è una casa dove si parla di queste cose, è una casa dove si apparecchia per le otto e si discute se il basilico va lavato o solo pulito. Ma l'ho visto, e la casa l'ha visto, e tra le sue funzioni c'è anche questa: essere il luogo dove le cose si vedono un anno prima che si dicano.

L'ultimo giorno faccio sempre lo stesso giro. Chiudo le persiane una a una, stacco la corrente, lascio le chiavi nel posto che tutti conosciamo e che non scriverò nemmeno qui. Poi resto un momento nell'ingresso, al fresco, ad ascoltare la casa che torna ad essere di nessuno. Ci vediamo l'anno prossimo, le dico. Vediamo chi ti porto.