I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement. I could faintly hear myself breathe but could not manage to inflate my lungs. My heart was beating either much too much or much too little. Any movement, however slight, required forethought and planning.

How many times I could have died before now, and in how many different ways. And yet I came close only once: a speeding sedan ran a red light, hit three other vehicles, and jack-knifed into my rear wheel split second after I’d stepped out of my parked car. A bystander described the scene to me later. “You were a millimetre away from losing your legs,” he said.

The print size in my mind decreased with time’s incremental decline, and as I arrived at the last word – weeks – it suddenly struck me, with all the force of the fullest sense of the word ‘struck’, that this could actually be his answer and not just the logical next time period in my sentence. Every cell in my body, except those responsible for maintaining a reasonable, calm exterior, was now lindy-hopping at that possibility, the only one that hadn’t occurred to me until that moment.

Giving birth is much more treacherous than people let on.

My mother: she’s an inspiration. She went back to college in her 40s, started karate and became a black belt.

I am a good sleeper.

An English teacher, and then a dance teacher.

When I was younger, I appeared in the Halifax adverts that featured a cake or a bridge made of hundreds of people. You stood there for three days and were not even really seen.

To Jade, my other half, because I can be hard work sometimes, and he is the most calm and understanding person I’ve ever met.

Magical, warm, but also butterflies.