I had begun writing about other things these past few weeks. I was writing an essay about my grandmother, whom I love deeply, and whose eyes are beginning to fail her. I was writing about how she loved Anna Karenina and used to read it to her own grandmother, who was blind.  I had also started writing about another client of mine, who suffered, not unlike Henry, from addiction and depression and various other afflictions. But I recently started a new semester of school and a new internship and was having trouble finishing everything. The words were just not coming together easily; the prose felt disjointed and lacked something, some cohesion.

Laura and I were sitting up front, and Henry was directly behind me. This was a couple of months ago and we were driving out to Westchester on a Monday afternoon. I was periodically checking on Henry through the rearview mirror. He was usually extremely talkative, bordering on manic, but his eyes kept closing shut and he was slipping in and out of sleep. He was middle aged but boyish in so many ways; today he looked like an overgrown teenager in a boy’s tee shirt and a baseball cap. I’d only known him for a couple months, but from the beginning I felt a tug of affection toward him—for the ways that he was forthcoming and insightful about his addiction and his depression, and how he confided that sometimes he honestly felt more comfortable when he was in prison than when he was out.