Until his death at fifty-three, my father, a painter, suffered from frequent bouts of debilitating insomnia that my mother would do her best to assuage out of loyalty or love or perhaps out of fear of his black moods.

But it almost never worked and often made matters worse.

In that soothing voice of hers, she would read to him in bed from the limpid prose of Chateaubriand's Memoirs from Beyond the Grave—"When I was a young man, and learned the meaning of love, I was a mystery to myself. All my days were adieux. I could not see a woman without being troubled. I blushed if one spoke to me"—and just as she thought he had at last dropped off, he would raise his chin to murmur, "Continue."

One evening, she walked at his shoulder through the surrounding farmland, past abandoned cottages, outbuildings, and hay stacked in the moonlight resembling moai heads. They crossed over several covered bridges until, like two vagabonds stricken with dromomania, they found themselves twelve miles from home.

From there, they boarded the train to the city—my mother with her bounteous black hair pinned up and my father looking out the darkened cabin—and upon disembarking and checking in to a room near the station, she fell asleep as he saw sunlight on the ceiling.

A 10x14 painting of his, cut tulips in cochineal red in a fluted vase of clear Depression glass, adorns the wall above my writing desk. The background in the painting is a window onto a lane of wildflowers and quaking aspens that recedes to a vanishing point.

Apparently, glass is the hardest thing to paint: it's invisible, but you have to give the impression that it's there. Here he's managed that feat twice. Three times if you count the vase's water. The week after I first hung the painting, I repeatedly mistook its view for my own.

There exists a species of loneliness known to afflict academics, my therapist says to me from her tiny black box on Zoom. Which accounts, she says, for the high rates of suicide in the profession. Have you ever noticed their windows only open a few inches? A safety measure to prevent them from succumbing to feelings of unremitting anxiety and overwhelming failure.

For weeks, she keeps returning to the subject of suicidal ideation.

In response, I tell her about the field guide to birds I inherited from my father. It is illustrated with white-throated sparrows, goldfinches, and dark-eyed juncos which I've never given much thought, and since I'm quite certain I've never laid eyes on any in all of my years, I wonder if they exist in a secret world of arbors in the city, sheltered and out of reach and imperceptible but for their songs.

My mother thinks in retrospect that my father was happiest during his youthful travels, especially through the embroidered world of Tangier and its fabled fluid light that suffused the harbor and the green mountains of the coastline with the promise that their essences could be revealed.

In one of the few surviving photographs from that time, he sips mint tea in a café that was famous among locals for its wicker cages suspended from the ceiling, each containing a single songbird. His notebook is open on the table to a sketch of an acanthus leaf he had drawn in the lush garden of a wealthy Englishman near the casbah.

Last week, as I sat in the park between classes, I was immersed in the romance and pathos of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. A young woman clad in black took a seat on the nearest bench. She had such beautiful cheekbones that I thought she might be a character in a novel whose pages were being turned just then in another life.

I watched as she perched a book on her knee and reached into her clamshell purse to retrieve a green orange with the stem attached. She peeled it with her pale, sylphlike hands and the air around us was instantly filled with the smell of cleanliness and hope.

By next June, this will feel like a long time ago, I thought.

You can't live in the conditional tense, Thomas. It's not a real place, my therapist insists at the end of our session. It's a fantasy.

My father would often stand in front of a blank canvas in the solarium with sweat dripping down his temples. Nervous and bored at the same time, he'd stare at it for an hour, as if with his mind alone he could make the painting come to life or disappear.

One day, I will recreate this moment in a story. But I'll put myself in the scene, a toddler again, potbellied in blue-footed pajamas like some clumsy flightless bird, posing behind the canvas, frightened yet exhilarated, begging to be seen and to see what I am becoming.


.