There are things I would not understand for many years. One of them is this: when my mother died, her obituary would say she was surrounded by her three children. That was not true or accurate.

Durham, North Carolina. Early 2001.

Qwillpen had made the offer before I was ready to take it.

She and David lived in Durham, and she had said, more than once, that if things got bad enough in Wilmington, I should come. She meant it the way people mean things when they have been through something themselves and understand, from the inside, what a person looks like when they are running out of ground to stand on. She had her own history with John F. She did not need me to explain what he was capable of, or why a person caught in the machinery of his particular damage might end up with nothing left to protect.

When the last job in Wilmington ended, I called her.

"Is the offer still open?"

It was.

I packed what I still had — which was not much — and drove north.

I don't remember the drive clearly. I remember the highway unspooling in the dark, the lights of small towns appearing and receding, the radio or the absence of it. I was not driving toward something so much as away from what had become impossible to stay inside. The city that had been my home for nearly a decade had become a place that showed me, in every direction I looked, something I had lost. The house. The practice. Lynn. The readings at the Coastline Convention Center. The version of myself who had believed, for a good stretch of years, that he had found his life.

I left at night and arrived in the early morning.

David and Qwillpen gave me a place to sleep. I want to say that plainly because it is easy to pass over such things in narration — a couch, a spare room, a place to put down the weight you have been carrying — and not fully reckon with what they represent. They didn't ask me to explain myself. They didn't require an accounting of how things had deteriorated to this point. They had their own understanding of what John F. had done, the particular way he inserted himself into the lives of people who were already vulnerable, the way his presence made things worse while appearing to make them better, the way he needed people to remain unwell in order to remain relevant.

Qwillpen had been there. Her understanding of it was not theoretical.

I was thirty-five years old. I was sleeping in someone else's house in a city where I knew two people. I had no practice, no license, no relationship, no home of my own. I had a small amount of money that was running out. I had whatever was left of the professional identity I had spent years building, which was currently being sorted through by a licensing board that had assessed me during the worst two months of my life and drawn conclusions accordingly.

What I had, more than anything, was the immediate, bodily requirement of getting through each day.

I was not thinking about the future in any ordered way. I was thinking about the next thing — the next meal, the next phone call, the next morning. This is what sustained overwhelm does to cognition. It does not make you stupid. It narrows your field. You focus on what is in front of you because the alternative is to see the whole extent of it, and the whole extent is not survivable at any given moment.

I focused on what was in front of me.

David and Qwillpen were in front of me. The room they had given me. Well, it wasn’t a full room. They had a living room and a spot on the living room floor. The couch was full most of the time and I would try to help them clean. There was hardly any room to move in their apartment but I didn’t complain.

It was more than I had expected to have, and I knew it, and I was grateful in a way that was too close to the surface to talk about directly.

That was where the work began. In the next session, we would choose one of the events and begin.