When his first child was born, Anjan Sundaram was torn between the new world of fatherhood and the old world of work — more specifically, conflict journalism. As his wife nursed their daughter, Sundaram pored through research about the Central African Republic, where a war had turned into a coup, and the insecurity thus unleashed was hardening into something even scarier. Sundaram couldn’t shake the call to cover a conflict few in the world had even heard of, but when he did, he couldn’t shake home. Sometimes, it buoyed him; other times, it haunted him.

For “The Cutting Room,” where authors share pieces they loved but ultimately had to cut from their latest books, Sundaram offers the original first chapter of his book Breakup: A Marriage in Wartime. By turns more raw and more melancholy, it calls forward his daughter as a leading character in his journey far away from her, one that ultimately cost him.

— Jina Moore Ngarambe for Guernica

My dear child,

This is your father. I have waited for this moment. I have found a way to speak to you and make a connection that is intimate, that is our own, that involves just us two.

I am in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. My knees are against my chest — this is where it hurts, in the chest, and most often in the mornings. As soon as I wake up, I feel dread, and in a moment the fear takes over my mind. I woke up this morning and was unable to stay in my bed, so I moved to the floor. I try to run away from myself, and a lack of space somehow brings me comfort.

The director of our television crew knocks on my door and calls through its wood. Are you ready, Anjan? We have a morning of interviews lined up for a documentary about religion. The director says the interviewees are waiting. I do not answer him. Yesterday he showed me footage of how I walked, looking lost. He wants me to be present, engaged, and enthusiastic. But my mornings have become frightening, and because of this, so are the moments when I go to bed.

I feel estranged. It is a wrenching thing to lose a part of yourself. I rise and run across the room — making a flailing sort of run, past the bed and to the cupboard — and find my recorder. I turn it on and speak into it. The calm in my voice takes me by surprise. It is there, I know, because I am speaking to you. I turn off my recorder and dance in my room, making a fairy dance. I jump from one corner to the other, feeling that I am indestructible.

I wonder how long the joy will last. I dread its departure and wait for the moment of anguish to return. I move deliberately, like a runner taking position for a sprint, until my knees touch my chest. The director knocks on my door. But I cannot respond. My mind has all but combusted. I am desperate to feel some connection, to lose my loneliness. From the depth of my feeling of loss, lying on the cold, I want to speak to you.

I close my eyes and listen the hum of my air conditioner and, beyond that, the shouted words of people on the street. Their words carry an urgent purpose. I pause my recording and open my eyes. I sense I could be anywhere.

After months of silence, what should I tell you? I must choose my words. Talking to you now brings a sweet relief. Should I teach you how to be good and what is right and wrong, or tell you something about myself?

I watch a silverfish feel its way with its long antennae across a strip of grime where the ceiling meets the wall. I feel an anxiety build within my mind.

I decide to tell you about a journey, and how everything changed during my three weeks in the Central African Republic, a distant country a lot of people have not heard of. Your mother said that it was during that journey that everything we had built together began to collapse. I need to remember so I can understand what happened.

I’m aware that the stories I’ve told you so far have been different: about girls, boys, and animals — some clever, some cunning, some silly. They were small stories whose characters did small things. Now, partly because I think you should know and partly because I need to tell you, partly because it was an experience for me of love and emotion and fear, partly because I need to speak to you and this is what I cannot stop thinking about, partly because this place is a piece of your history, and partly because I want you to know me and I need to feel a connection with you, I want to tell you this story. Can you sit for a little bit? You don’t have to be quiet. Just be here.

This story might seem complicated, but it really isn’t, and I’ll explain as we go along. I’m comfortable on my floor, and I worry that if I stop speaking, my pain will return. So without wasting any more time, I will tell you what happened.

I have discovered something distressing about our bodies: they need food and water to live, but not love. I feel dead, but my body in some grotesque way carries on. It still feels hunger, thirst, and all the other human urges.

We were living, in 2013, in a small Canadian town called Shippagan, on the Atlantic coast, where your mother grew up and where, a few months earlier, you had been born. I was soon leaving for Kigali, and it was on this final journey to Rwanda that I decided to also travel, for reporting, to the Central African Republic, where a rebellion brewed. After that journey I returned to Canada to discover a conflict at home. And one year later your mother and I split.

It was a time of such immense calm that I can hardly bear to think of it. I sat beside you on a bright morning and read about the successful coup d’état in the Central African Republic. No one knew exactly how many people had been killed in its war because no one had counted the dead. A million people had fled after no longer feeling safe in their homes. Two million were hungry.

I didn’t want to leave. Here in Shippagan, it was serene. I was with you. I took pleasure in taking you to the local aquarium. We watched the jellyfish, a baby seal, and a blue crab that you liked to touch — we weren’t allowed to touch it, but I allowed you. The seal swam in circles, twisting like a torpedo; it was trapped in the tank. The people of Shippagan, a town of three thousand people, grew excited about naming this seal. They launched a local contest, and many sent in names, each hoping that theirs would be chosen. But soon afterward, the seal died, and people forgot about it. I took you for walks in the woods. You slept against my chest in a carrier — like in a kangaroo’s pocket.

My memories of those early days as a father are fading. You see, my memories suddenly stopped accumulating, after the shock. My mind did not know whether to keep the joy of those moments or remember the pain in which they ended. So I stopped evoking those memories, and some of them were inevitably lost. I suspect the moments fullest with love were the first to go. Love and pain became intertwined. I will see if I can conjure up another memory from that period.

The memories that arrive first are difficult ones. At that time — I had forgotten this, but now I remember — we slept in the same room. After an evening of work — you would already be asleep — I entered our bedroom, full of the smell of your breath. I checked that you had not kicked off your blanket or twisted your arms, and I fell asleep to the sounds of your wheezes and the smacking of your lips. You woke silently in the mornings, so when I opened my eyes, sometimes I found you watching me.

In bewilderment at my fatherhood, I tried to come at it in my own way. A friend gifted me a book that spoke about the strength of infants’ grips. Babies had evolved to be able to grab branches and carry their own weight should they slip. So I tested your grip on my fingers. This author, a primatologist, also wrote that infants like to feel strong. It’s why you enjoyed balloons — they appeared imposing, but you thrashed them about.

No one in Shippagan spoke about the Central African Republic. Many had never heard about the country. The Central African Republic felt unnecessary to our existence. I could forget about it, banish it from my life and pass the days never reminded of it.

But it bloomed in my mind like a pigment that enters water, with tentacles that reached into my dreams. I woke up thinking about the place, dwelling on the rumors I had received. On the internet, I read that the conflict was growing. It grew disconcerting, how easily I could ignore this news. So I began to try to remind myself.

I enjoyed the smallness of my existence in Shippagan. I could consume the world in controllable portions that could be switched off or folded up when they became overwhelming. There was also a great deal to explore. A once-burgeoning fishing industry had made Shippagan one of Canada’s wealthiest towns, before the recent years of decline. I grew curious about Shippagan’s Francophone community: In the early twentieth century, the English-speaking rulers of Canada, representatives of the Queen of England, had banned French in local schools. But the propaganda had worked; the Queen was now a celebrity in Shippagan, even among those who had been prohibited from speaking their native French. Magazines about the royal family were bestsellers in the supermarkets. Half an hour from Shippagan, there was a place called Miscou, where one could stand at the tip of the peninsula. It felt like the end of the earth.

Strange as it may sound, from that remote place, the Central African Republic did not seem so distant. Around you, I felt a new sense of connection to things.

In our house, while you were asleep one day, I spent an afternoon looking at the wind rustling the leaves in swirls. The giant green garbage collection truck came, making a terrific noise, and it left, leaving the street in silence.

Before going to bed that night, I couldn’t get a nursery rhyme out of my head: Three blind mice, three blind mice. / See how they run! See how they run! The rhyme has entered my mind at the worst moment. I used to sing it to you, and now it haunts me. Something is working away in my mind’s recesses, I think. For now, all I want is for this rhyme to go away.

We are all creatures of sadness. Even if we think we are happy, and even if we feel we are happy, we are nursing sadness somewhere, perhaps buried deep. A banging starts on the pipes outside, and I am grateful: the three blind mice are gone. I start to wonder from where they came, and one thought leads to the next. I should have let them go. My mind is playing tricks. The anxiety has returned. Are you still listening to me?

Anjan Sundaram’s book, Breakup: A Marriage in Wartime, is out this month from Catapult.