Narrator’s depression and anxiety

Narrator’s depression and anxiety are presented as part of an ongoing bereavement rather than as a condition detached from loss. The narrator describes disorientation, exhaustion, disrupted routines, and fear; a therapist names these experiences as symptoms of grief. Apollo provides essential emotional support, but the narrative does not make care or clinical explanation a cure: the narrator continues to miss the Deceased Friend and to address that absence directly.

Symptoms and Clinical Recognition

The narrator describes moments of feeling close to madness, when reality seems distorted and a fog descends. In a classroom, the narrator questions why they are there; looking in a mirror, their own face seems strange. Even their writing can feel unfamiliar, as if its meaning has become inaccessible. These episodes make ordinary surroundings feel uncertain without establishing that the narrator has lost touch with reality.

The distress also appears in daily functioning. Despite sleeping, the narrator remains exhausted, bumps into things, drops objects, and trips. On one occasion, they step off a curb into the path of a car and are pulled back by someone nearby. Eating becomes irregular: some days the narrator does not eat, while on others they eat only junk food. They also report disproportionate worries about a gas leak, misplaced belongings, and forgetting to file taxes.

The therapist tells the narrator that these are symptoms of bereavement. The narrator regards the explanation as obvious, but it gives the scattered experiences a name without making them disappear. After several sessions, the narrator tells Apollo that they may be beginning to feel a little better, a modest change rather than a declaration of recovery.

Grief, Apollo, and Emotional Support

In seeking permission to keep Apollo in the apartment, the narrator obtains documentation from a therapist stating that depression and anxiety aggravated by bereavement make the dog’s emotional support essential; losing it could harm the narrator’s mental health and might be life-threatening. The practical claim carries an emotional complication: the narrator also fears that another move could damage Apollo. The relationship is therefore represented as mutual care, even as the formal documentation concerns the narrator’s need for support.

The narrator wonders whether treating Apollo selflessly and loving him might somehow bring the Deceased Friend back. The thought is posed as a question, not as a settled belief: Apollo’s presence can hold the narrator’s care and longing, but it cannot reverse the death. The narrator is also reluctant to play a recording of the Friend reading aloud. Apollo does not appear to focus on screens, but the narrator thinks he might recognize the voice and worries that hearing it could distress or confuse him.

Reading aloud offers a quieter form of comfort. The narrator reads Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet to Apollo. The dog settles against the narrator’s legs and responds to the changes in their voice; the narrator, too, finds the act soothing. The scene makes consolation reciprocal and immediate, but not equivalent to forgetting the Friend or resolving grief.

Language, Memory, and Continuing Loss

The narrator’s account repeatedly turns toward the absent Friend. The dead are imagined as dwelling in the conditional tense, in the unreal possibilities of what would have happened. That grammar gives the narrator a way to describe how bereavement keeps alternative futures present, while also emphasizing that those futures cannot be recovered. The sense that the Friend might read the words, or know them before they are written, further blurs remembrance and imagined presence.

At one point the narrator states the loss plainly: the Friend is missed every day, very much. Later, the wording shifts from addressing the Friend as you to remembering him as he, but the feeling remains unchanged. The narrator would not want that feeling to vanish. Grief is therefore not framed simply as a symptom to eliminate; its persistence is also bound to the continuing relationship with the person who died.

Near the end, the narrator wonders whether speech is directed to the Friend or to the self, acknowledging that the boundary has blurred. In the closing passage, the narrator wants to call the Friend’s name, but the word fails in the throat; the outcry that follows names the relationship rather than explaining it. Depression and anxiety remain entangled with this unresolved address: the narrative records some easing, but ends without claiming that either language or time has brought the bereaved person to closure.