My therapist asked me for a safe place. “Visualize yourself there,” she tells me. “Even if it’s difficult. It gets easier with practice. Some day, when you need to, you’ll be able to imagine yourself there at will.”

So, in my imagination:

I am sitting on a driftwood log, on the pebbly shore of a cove on the east side of Seneca.

I know that this pebbly shore is on the east side of the lake because the sun sets in the west, and I remember that the sun always used to set on the other side of the water, across from us, every evening without fail.

In my memory, waves broke on the shore in a steady rhythm. They’d come rolling in from somewhere in the middle of the great wide stretch of water. At the edge of the water, seaweed collected in a thick, wide swath of green. There would always be lake-smoothed bits of colored glass, and shells, and bones, and sticks of wood, washed up and waiting. There, at the place where the seaweed meets the fine, dark pebbles, you might find a dead fish, rotting, or pools of green water, or the perfect stones for skipping, flat and smooth and round and light.

I can hear the surf, crashing, constantly and gently. I can summon up the shoreline in as much detail as I want to: the sharp curve of the beach, the steep bank between the grass and clover beside the cottage and the shore, the ancient willow tree, the creek. I can see the old wooden dock. It isn’t there now, but it used to be, and I remember. In my imagination it’s as battered and sturdy and real as it was when I was a child – the rough, wide, splintery boards, the mist-soaked beams, the thick round pillars half-submerged in shallow water, growing thick with zebra muscles and lake-weeds.

I am sitting on a driftwood log, bare feet resting on fine, warm pebbles. The sky is overcast and grey and it might rain, and the lake is calm and dusty grey and deep and faded blue, and the surf is rushing in, the waves are breaking in their steady rhythm.

This is a good place, for me. A meeting place, for all my splintered selves. There at the edges of things, at Seneca’s edges, is about as safe a place as there’s ever going to be.

And I can travel there, in a moment, in my mind.