THE TENT WAS ten feet wide by twenty feet long, and its plastic roof and walls were the color of raw chicken. It had two large windows whose mesh screens were green with algae and black with mold; geckos laid delicate white eggs in the rolled-up weather flaps.
My husband and I lived in this tent for nine months when he was getting back on his feet after a mental health crisis. At the time, I experienced the tent and the land surrounding it as a place of intense anxiety. I feared the brown hunting spiders with their huge egg sacks, and the cockroaches, which were forever scuttling out of dark corners. When the wind blew at night, I worried that a branch from one of the tall, muscular monkeypod trees would snap off and crush us in our bed.
