keep dreaming of a two story house with those all-around balconies in the middle of the Midwest with snow outside and I am living there writing or painting. I am alone, but I am productive if not in creation than in mood. It is weird but I thrive by maudlin means. I have everything I need there.

I believe I am also a teacher of literature, but I don't know where or at what level. I see myself in class reading works from The Norton Anthology of American Literature, literary journals or talking about students' works. I take each line and let them act as diving boards out into the world and relate their thoughts to what they conjure. I also play music and project images on the screen and ask the students to write the thoughts that come to them without interference. I also ask them to do what my Photography professor used to do. She would ask us strange questions that we would have to illustrate in photographs. I show them movies and ask them to talk about them either on paper or I encourage them to speak without care for what might come out but that they are careful to stay with their streams of consciousness. In fact, I ask them all to begin in a crescendo of words. They can have conversations with each other too. It is a cacophony of words. It is wondrous. You should hear them. They are free with me. I let them become the words in their heads.

Otherwise, I wait out the winters writing for hours and hours. I stare out into the blank view. I have a tea kettle that I frequently fill and pour myself tea. I don't worry about cleaning, except of course the food. I keep a tight noose on the dishes and the trash, but I like how clothes fall and where they rest, or how the stacks of paper on my desk are indicative of layers of time and what I was conscious of in those moments. Still, if I sense people are coming over; I spend the entire time trying to organize and clean.

I'm crossing the Bay bridge, but it's got escalators that are closed. I find myself in a dusty office food court, and intersecting and remembering parts of myself from when I was very young. I meet up with an old friend of my mother's, and on a bulletin board next to us find three cds I apparantly made to give out last year. But when we watch one of the CDs, it's also a film, and the film shows my bookshelves as a child - and somehow brings back to me a whole lot of memories which are not even mine. Memories of a sewing machine, a very simple one, which I owned, with an old price tag from Greenfield's for $23, with threads I used to own, and on the CDs are movies I loved...one of which I was in, a movie which was like a Sound of Music, but different. All these memories are bringing up random real memories but are also bringing up fascinating memories which are not mine. Friends I didn't have, jobs I didn't hold, and a sense of past and present meshing perfectly. I am trying to grab onto the knowledge of the past me as if it was a liferaft. In the film I took, I see the camera pan across a bookshelf and I remember most of the books, and the ones I cannot remember seem to be the most direct sort of clue to my present happiness. I see a book called Bread Cake. I see a book about Anne Boleyn. I see a sewing machine and remember hours spent on it, as the stories I read of other children sewing become me sewing.