It wasn’t easy to talk about, especially under the fluorescent lights in the campus hallway as a stream of professors and students rushed past. I pressed my fingers hard into the stainless steel of my flask of coffee, now cold and bitter.
“I have to get back for my son,” I told Annie, once again turning down her invitation to Taco Tuesday and a chance to hang out with our bookish cohort of M.F.A. students. I so wanted to be young and untethered, and I feared never being able to go. But my son, recently released from the hospital after what the doctors would later call a “psychotic break,” was home alone.
