My sister once said that I was uninteresting because I lacked an original wound.

Everyone had a wound, she said, whether it was the first time a parent ignored you, the grief of being ripped from the womb, the horror at seeing yourself in the mirror. But I didn’t have one. All my other siblings did.

Not having a wound didn’t really bother me until I was unemployed. I’d been laid off, so I got a comfortable severance package. At the end of the three-months I decided to take an aptitude test—I thought it might be a good time for a career change. The questions were normal. You had to rank them from “Never” to “Infrequently” to “Frequently” to “Always.”

“How often do you double check your work?” “Do you enjoy working alone?” “Do you pack lunch for work?”

But in the end, the quiz just told me I should be an office administrator. What even is that? I wanted the quiz to tell me to do something useful, like become a carpenter or go work in a mine. I read those two words, “office administrator,” over and over and over again and it didn’t make me happy, but it didn’t make me sad either. My sister's words came to me again and I wondered if my wound was dullness, and if this had stunted my emotional and cognitive development.

I thought about that quiz alot. I thought about people who spoke in tongues and hypnotists. I thought about people in anger management classes, people who could not be controlled. I was all control. I was stable, I was healthy, I was okay. In the shower, I would ball my fists, squeeze them until my knuckles turned white and I shook. I wanted the skin to grow so tight that my bones ripped through. I wanted to feel something that I couldn’t understand.

Around this time my grandmother became very sick and I had to go home very suddenly. I hate to admit it out loud, but I always want these sorts of things to happen to me so I don’t have to make decisions for myself. I liked reacting to events. This was right before Christmas, and all the last minute train and bus tickets were expensive. My friend mentioned that her friend’s boyfriend was driving to the city the next day, and that he could drop me off at the ferry on his way.

He picked me up early in the morning. We had received a lot of snow in early December, and then it got hot and melted, then got very cold very quickly so everything was covered in a layer of grey ice. The city street looked shiny, like it had been polished and buffed.

I remember seeing him through the car window. When he smiled at me, he smiled crooked, the right side of his mouth pulling up. We introduced ourselves, I said my grandma was sick, he said he was visiting his great aunt for the first time. There had been a long family estrangement, and one day, it was over, and everyone was invited for Christmas again.

He’d never gone to Toronto, he said. I’d gone to school there so I told him stories about how big it seemed to me, how I’d watched my first landlord kill a skunk execution style in our front yard, how I’d never gone up the CN tower. It was sort of out of the way, it was always a bit too expensive, there was never the occasion. We talked more.

At first, it felt like a first date, or a job interview. What do you like to do? Do you have any siblings? Any hobbies? When was the last time you shat your pants?

I learned that, as kids, we’d both tried and failed to become ambidextrous. Briefly, he’d become addicted to drinking Nyquil, and when I asked if that was the same as being addicted to lean, he said he honestly didn’t know the difference, and I said that I didn’t either. I told him that benedryl is actually the best over the counter medication to take if you want a deep, dreamless sleep. We both disliked rock climbing gyms. This surprised me, because he had studied environmental science and was working on some eco justice advocacy.

I asked if working so closely in climate stuff made him sad.

Yes, he said, but also hopeful. But sometimes, he said, it got to be too much.

This confused me. I’d always assumed people who worked closer to death—doctors, morticians, scientists—would have a deeper understanding of annihilation than I did. Suddenly, my world felt vast and dark.

There was very little traffic on the highway. I’d expected more, since we were so close to the holidays. Small bead-like snowflakes began to pepper the windshield. The radio said something about a bomb cyclone. By the time we crossed into Ontario the sky was thick with snow. Cars were crawling down the highway. He asked if this was going to affect my ferry home, and I said that it was a weekday, so there were crossings every half hour until 10, so I should be fine.

At some point in the drive the traffic let up and we stopped to get food. The rest stop looked like a prison. As we walked back to the car I listened to the soft shuffle of our feet against the frosted pavement.

Suddenly I felt him reach out and touch my arm. I looked back and saw him frozen in place. Standing at the edge of the parking lot was a coyote. Behind it, a field, turned over for winter. I could see its tawny coat through the falling snow. We were maybe 15-ft away.

In his face, I saw something that I could not quite place.

An 18-wheeler came thundering into the parking lot, and startled the coyote. It was only then I saw that the coyote was missing a limb. I watched the coyote’s shaggy legs bounce away.

He apologized, saying that he didn’t know why the coyote had freaked him out so much.

We got back in the car and kept driving. More traffic. My mom texted me a news link about a pile-up that happened further south on the highway. We slowed to a halt. We got bored of music, so we switched to a talk radio program about the history of the Polynesian empire. I closed my eyes and listened to this warm voice tell me about Polynesian seafaring, how it was hypothesized that Polynesians had made contact in South America, how they used stars and the migration patterns of birds to travel tens of kilometers across an ocean that they did not know the limits of. I thought about birds and self-propelled sea vessels. I pictured myself at the bow of a ship, staring at an endless horizon. I fell asleep somewhere close to Brockville, and was woken by a gentle nudge.

I blinked and saw his face, and for a split second, I forgot that anyone else existed but the two of us. Then it all sharpened into focus: my sisters, my brother, my parents, my grandmother, his girlfriend. The edges of the world no longer soft, but made of a dense, concrete material.

The snow had thinned out, but I could hear the wind ripping viciously against the car. I had drool crusted to my chin. Before I left he handed me a large mint tea and a plain Tim Horton’s bagel, toasted with butter. It radiated a gentle heat in my hands.

When I said goodbye I let my hand linger for too long on his elbow as I pulled away from his embrace. I wanted him to linger awkwardly, too. I wanted him to do something drastic so I could react.

I expected him to drive away, but when I climbed to the top of the ferry, I could see him waiting in the parking lot, leaning against his car. I squinted, the wind slicing against my eyes. A strong gust had flipped his jacket collar up. I waved in his direction. He waved back. I thought about jumping up and down, about throwing myself from the top of the boat, about screaming for him. I could change the course of my life if I wanted to. I wanted to stop everything and ask him to burrow beneath my skin and become my disgusting, festering wound. Or maybe, I wanted something darker: I just wanted a man to define the limits to my existence.

The snow picked up again. It swirled against the frozen ground. I knew I’d have to go below deck soon, but I wanted to stay, just for a bit. Staring at the shoreline, searching for something that I could not quite place.

As the ferry pulled away, I watched him shrink, smaller and smaller, until his features blurred into a silhouette, and then he became a pinpoint, and then he was gone.