On Monday night she went offline. She told us it was only going to be a few hours. She told us she was going to be alright. She came back online three hours later. She said she was tired. She said she was going to tell us all about it.

In the early morning her girlfriend told us there were wounds on her wrists. She told us she hurt herself and was confused. We went into the city and surprised her. She had no intention of telling us anything. She looked completely normal. I confronted her: when are you going to tell us about your wrists?

She cried. We talked. I looked at her right wrist: cat scratches. But that’s with the left hand, the weaker one. I looked at the other. There, the first cut, or attempt. A little deeper. She was told to find a church. She was told she could save him if she prayed there. Alone all this time. Late evening. Dark streets. She made an offering with a found piece of glass. Or tried to.

She said she didn’t know what was real. She said she felt disillusioned. We took her home. She rested. She had to go back into the city the next day. On the surface, I couldn’t tell the difference. We talked. Her feelings, her realizations. I don’t know if her silence is disappointment or if she is still sorting it all out. If she is trying to reconnect. I joined a meeting through the phone, she did what she had to do, I was just around the corner. It was raining, we got some bagels. She was sweet and quiet like on all road trips. She was just as she ever was.

We return home, she focused on school work. She writes in her journal towards the end of the day. She rests her head and continues to write. Is this the cause, the sign I should looking for? Is my blessing her curse? The thing, this thing, that keeps me grounded, did it untether her? Did she make the mistake of trying to breach an impassible membrane when the beauty of this is that very barrier? That the point of writing is it’s inherent artifice and not the raw, unbearable truth?

The next day, Thursday, we go into the city together on the train, she has a midterm. I go into the office. Luckily we agreed we’ll come back home together. We keep in touch via text throughout the day. I worry but work, I pretend. I’m distracted, this is the last place I want to be. I put all this in a box. After a string of meetings and a presentation, I go outside, I peek, I hear the sound, the roar. I close the box before it breaks me.

Friday is the greatest challenge. She goes in alone and I can’t join her, I have to be there for him. I couldn’t choose, I have to believe she is strong, that this was a one time thing. I have to have faith in her. I have to show her I have faith in her. Waiting to leave she sees the tears on my face. She asks, why are you crying? I lie, am I? I leave her, I get home, I cannot bear it, I struggle to get into the rhythm of the work. We text throughout the morning. I go to him, we talk about his future. I am torn and have to forget, deny it all, deny the last three days. At some point she will need to cross Central Park for an appointment but tells me she dreads it. Thankfully, we got hit with a minor earthquake. It is all anyone talks about for the next hour. Her meeting goes hybrid. She says, Thank God. She comes home again.

After dinner she tells us she is still going to go on her trip to see the eclipse upstate. Measured, as if it was well thought out, definitive. Six hours away. I lose it. That right there, I tell her, tells me a lack of maturity in your thinking. She tells us she’ll be fine, she’ll be with friends, they’ll care for her, that this eclipse tha might never happen again, who knows if they’ll even know each other in the future. My mind reels, I push hard, but you’re ok with us being worried sick for eighteen hours, that’s worth it? She retorts, will you really be that worried all that time? I snap, when I came home today after I left you, I wept because for the first time in my life I had to choose between my two children, I couldn’t be in two places at once. I reminded her that she was not alone, we were always going to be there for her, but it also meant she had to consider the impact she has us, what her trip was going to do to us.

She relented. She went upstairs. I get scolded for being too rough but I don’t care. She and him are everything and if that means they leave this house hating me, but intact and strong and whole and safe, so be it. She comes back down, she hugs me. Everything is as it was.

Has she touched madness? Has she taken the first step down an easy staircase? Will it leave her alone, stop calling out to her? She was ready to not tell us anything, is she telling us everything now? When I look at her, what am I seeing? The beginning of something that will plague her life, hound her, keep her from living? Or is it a rite of passage that will be whispered about in the future and told to her children when it happens to them? I think of myself, the long road to get here, to some semblance of peace. And yet the days I feel the gristle of being alive and how there is never any rest. How everything vacillates between being unreal and surreal and I cannot be real. How it hinges on a piece of rust and the tension never, ever relents. How it’s all held together by sheer will.

I close my eyes and let the roar swallow me whole.