When you’re an unwanted child, you are erased, you disappear. You feel you’re nobody, nothing, and you fade away. Nothing can remove that stain from you, the essential curse, the wretchedness, unless it’s your absence, and you withdraw from life. That black hand grabs your throat, and like someone drowning, you struggle to draw air into your cells. These days, of course, plenty of people claim to have nervous breakdowns, but they don’t know what it means for your body to be paralyzed as your spirit watches from the outside, even as the two remain bound by a cord that makes the least movement or breath an excruciating enterprise. First when I was a child and then as a teenager, my breakdowns kept coming, and I taught myself how to deal with them by cutting the ties between myself and my family entirely, leaving home early each morning without a word to anyone. My mother didn’t want me, so I broke away. I lived apart from her. My soul became a balcony, suspended in the air, attached to the apartment but not really a part of its life.

Then Mary came. She made a new place for me in the house, a shelter. She taught me how to forget who I was, how to emerge from the corners by plunging into an observation of life around me. I would sit and watch her working for hours, immersed in wiping, washing, rinsing, polishing, and cooking, abstracting herself from mundane life as she entered into some tiny detail—a speck of dust, a spot of grease, a dirt stain, a seed or a grain—until I learned how to enter that detail along with her, leaving behind my body and all the troubles it brought. When I’d mastered that process, I moved on from watching Mary to tracking the movement of ants, sparrows, and the neighbors’ cat, whose “insouciance” I adopted, the kind that allowed it to spend languid mornings on the balcony, enjoying the sunlight and watching the world from above as it cleaned itself or swatted at a fly or a cockroach. I adopted the standoffishness and indifference of animals and forgot myself for a time, luxuriating in the happiest moments of my life, moments when I wasn’t me, when I fully detached myself from existence, lacking everything that made up the chains of this goddamned Mr. N.