Last night I had that dream again, the one about being shot in the face at close range and my mouth flying off down some white corridor, and I’m so angry with myself for not getting out of the way in time. 

My partner, E., said last evening: I know you people (meaning my family) don’t talk about your pain, you just kill yourselves. My daughter and I were impressed with the genuine comic worth of that statement. 

Another impressive moment from E.: Once, when speaking about my exes, he referred to them as my backlist. 

And what is the white corridor in my dream? A narrow spit of land? A thing between life and death? A sort of ledge? A high-up ledge, just wide enough for a smallish foot or hand to hold on to, but easy to drop from. A death-defying ledge? 

Awake last night, I heard my neighbor screaming alone in the back lane. I’ll bring this iron bar down on your fucking face! I. Hate. You. 

I lay in my dark bedroom, sinking into my memory foam, and nodded, calmly.

A skunk with distemper, who may have been living under our back deck for years until we did renovations, keeps returning to our house and falling blindly into the window well, where it gets trapped. The city says the skunk is too deranged to understand how not to keep coming back and falling into the same trap.

Recently, I’ve been seeing a Russian Jungian shrink. I read online that the greatest fear therapists have is that their client will commit suicide. Having read that⁠—stupidly, because why am I reading about the fears of therapists?⁠—I begin every session of ours, mine and my therapist’s, with a disclaimer: I’m not suicidal, don’t worry. And then I talk and talk and talk about suicide. 

In conventional therapy the patient, or “client,” moves forward from A to B to C. But the Jungian Zen Buddhist idea is that we can stay at A for as long as we want to, and if we stay at A long enough, B will come looking for us.

Last year a derecho blew through town on my birthday, at noon. It turned the sky green, brought down trees and hydro lines, smashed windows, scattered traffic cones and garbage, tipped cars, and knocked cyclists off their bikes. The skunk with distemper stayed safe, trapped in our window well. I picked up my four-year-old grandson and ran as fast as I could for shelter in the 7-Eleven near our home. The cashier told us to stay away from the glass door, closer to the grill. 

On that day many years ago, my mother finally convinced my father to order a ham sandwich. It was the last time she would see him, although she didn’t know that. He did it to make her happy. 

We sat at a long table at a family restaurant in Winnipeg called Tubby’s. The restaurant is not there anymore. My son, Owen, was eleven years old and bored. He wanted to meet up with his friends and shoot hoops. I watched my father watching Owen lope away down the sidewalk with not a single glance backward. Long minutes, long sidewalk, long table. 

My father didn’t touch his ham sandwich. He smiled and looked out the window at the long sidewalk and talked about colors with my daughter, Georgia. 

Why purple? 

I just like it.

In Athens, near the Parthenon, I saw a boy and his father standing on a gravel path and staring at a man in a wheelchair. The boy picked up a handful of tiny stones and threw them at the man in the wheelchair. His father laughed and put his arm around his shoulder.

The beginning and the end.

So … you were born? prompts my shrink.

Well, yeah. I was conceived on the night of my grandfather’s funeral. 

My mother would say, That night? That night your father was either going to kill himself or create a new life. 

That’s how I came to be. My mother had prayed for six years to become pregnant. Had she considered avenues other than prayer? That was my sister’s joke. And when I came along, finally, they gave me an old name from the Bible that means bitter and rebellious. 

I screamed nonstop the entire first year of my life. And my father stopped talking for that entire year. He was completely silent, like a mime⁠—but without miming. He would forget that I’d been born. My mother would point at me, tell him, The baby is here. Look, I am holding the baby. She’s in my arms, can’t you see? Sometimes she would flee to the neighbors’ house to cry at their kitchen table, leaving me screaming alone behind the bars of my crib. My father remained utterly silent. 

I had a terrible rash all over my body. I was allergic to milk. I was bright red and I bit myself and clawed my arms and face and pulled my hair out. My parents thought I was mentally “retarded” (the term they used at that time). Well, they had wanted me, they had prayed for me. It was me or death. And they got me: conceived from death and despair and six years of begging God, and born on the hottest day on record in my town. 

Speaking of futile. My first job after graduating from journalism school was “traffic girl” for the tiniest radio station in the province of Manitoba⁠—a four-by-six cinder-block structure with an antenna on top, in the middle of a wheat field next to the Perimeter Highway. There wasn’t much traffic. 

My job was to get up early⁠—5 A.M.⁠—and listen to another radio station’s traffic report, then call in to my tiny station and say exactly the same thing. For example, “Watch out for exhaust fog at the intersections.” Maybe I’d change a word or two. Add random words. Phrases like my man. Or I’d say, Traffic is heeeeeeeaaaavy.

When I got hired for the job the manager asked me what my name was, and when I told him, he said, No, no way, that’s a crazy name, you’re gonna be Lisa Cook. He told me to sign off with: And that’s your traffic report, folks. I’m Lisa Cook. 

My kids were little then. They were asleep at that hour, and it was so dark and quiet, and I loved it, thirty below outside, wind howling, sitting on the couch in my pajamas, calling in the traffic report and using a fake name, adding words. The fog is baaaaaaaad, my man. 

Once, I signed off with “Let’s move it, move it, move it in a love direction.” 

Finding your voice is different from hearing voices in your head. Or it isn’t.