I finally walked into her room one night to confront her about it. She was lying on her bed watching a video on her phone. I lay down beside her, our hair touching. She was watching a documentary about whale hunting in Japan. I lay there beside her, looking up at the ceiling, listening to the video. After a couple of minutes she reached out and laid the top of her hand across my forehead.

You’re like fuckin’ Night of the Walking Dead, Mom.

I exhaled. I know.

You look hollowed out.

Hmm. Thanks.

She turned her head to look at me, her eyes right beside mine. Honest, she said. Have you even looked at yourself in the mirror?

I own one, yes.

Well it’s a bad scene, wench.

I’m aware.

You’re burnt out.

I nodded, and she lightly gripped the top of my head while still looking into my eyes. Stop coming to school, she said. Please. I’m literally begging you.

I’m embarrassing you.

Yes. You are. I’m sorry, but yes.

My eyes stung and I closed them. I remembered my mother once showing up smelling of liquor to a parent-teacher meeting and wishing I could evaporate into thin air. I remembered feeling how desperately I never wanted my daughter to be embarrassed by me. I swallowed and mumbled a promise to Ashley that I would speak to Valeria in the morning about taking some stress leave.

Valeria Moreno, my school’s principal, allowed me to use the entire allotment of my year’s paid sick leave. I hadn’t intended to be off for so long, but it soon became clear that I was not getting better. On my GP’s advice, I took an additional two weeks of unpaid leave, but even then, I wasn’t sleeping. I spent my days home alone, medicating, meditating, masturbating. I’m not sure you realize just how unhinged you can get if you haven’t really slept for weeks on end. Your brain is not nearly as robust as you’d like to think it is. Throughout this time, Paul accompanied me to my appointments with the audiologist, Dr. Sandra Heard (I kid you not), who ran a gamut of tests and ruled out tinnitus, spontaneous otoacoustic emissions, and basically all other medical explanations. She believed I might be hypersensitive to white noise in my environment, and that I was becoming fixated on a tone that would normally go unnoticed; something she had occasionally seen in patients who were dealing with acute stress. I told her I hadn’t felt particularly stressed before all of this began. I wasn’t directing the school musical that year, I liked my students, I had good colleagues, things were fine with Paul, we had some debt but who didn’t? Dr. Heard said that was all beyond her pay grade but encouraged me to consider speaking to a therapist.