Each night, Rei waited until I had finished in the bathroom, before taking her shower and brushing her teeth. I would go into my own room and close the door. Then I’d hear her slippered feet in the corridor outside. I slept badly, another side effect of my medication, but I never left the room. Since I found it hard to concentrate on reading, and I didn’t want to make Rei nervous by wandering around the apartment, I spent my insomniac hours in an activity that I would have sneered at just a few months previously, filling in elaborate mandala patterns in one of those “adult” coloring books that are marketed as tools for stress relief. It was a pointless task (in general I’ve never liked doing anything “just to pass the time”) and it made me feel like a prisoner whiling away his sentence doing weaving or scrimshaw, but I persisted. I was determined to get well, to be normal. Whatever it took to come back home.