i wake up, and it feels like this past summer, seattle, 5am. the time i would usually be going to sleep, unbothered that the world would go on without me into the early afternoon.

coming out of bed to shiver for a half hour, like i usually do, regardless of outside temperature, no coffee hot enough to smooth over my goosebumped skin.

vika knocking on the door to make me face the day, turning the blinds, calling me Sleepy Head, daring me to go out into the world.

i wake up, and it feels like the autumn after i graduated from cal, in the home i grew up, 6pm. staring at the cool blue walls of my bedroom, feeling the tiny fingers of my napping dreams still tracing the lines of my face, ribbons of cloud covered light coming from the edges of the blinds.

sitting up on my knees and peering out the window to the black bird who sat on a branch of my olive tree and skipped from foot to foot, pretending i couldn't see its little october dance.

wondering about an architect who threw paint on walls and wrote me letters from busy new york subway undergrounds, who thought he saw me in egon schiele posters.

who wrote me poems that made me smile and a little breathless.

knowing nothing about him, but writing him about the olive tree and the bird, the loneliness of empty journals and dead tea bags in the bottom of mugs with hairline cracks, stained brown and making maps of draught ridden rivers.

i wake up, and it feels like the morning of my 7th birthday, april 1981, when the sky was so dark with storm cluds by 3pm, the heavens opened up so completely with cry big fat sorrowful tears, that no one came to my brithday party.

my mother holding me in her lap, my father holding my baby brother in the candle-lit dark, the electricity out with the storm, my sister staring at my birthday candles so close her eyelashes were almost taken off.

singing happy birthday, my little family and me.

being proud of not being afraid of the thunder and lightening. momentarily forgetting my jealously of my baby brother and playing with his toes to distract him from the clap and bang that shook the windows and made the dogs circle us with protective mewling.

i wake up and it feels like a year ago, cedar rapids, 4pm. sitting at my computer and watching the factory across the way blow white life cereal scented plumes into the sky. looking around my high-ceiling'd boxed filled apartment, sure that my heart was dying, feeling a cold empty steel hollowness inside my chest, thinking about the wide streets of downtown, filled with no one. a dead downtown filled with lifeless sculptures by local artists and trees that already had lost their leaves.

listening for the train to break up the traffic, listening to stuart scratch up every doorframe of that lonely dead apartment, miserable to only be able to smell outside, tortured by pigeons free to fly wherever they wanted.

reading emails from a man who did not exist, deciding how early was too early to start drinking whiskey, playing train song on repeat until the words became part of my skin.

i wake up and it's now, seattle, noon. i shake dreams of card games and telephones out of my hair. i walk into my kitchen, counters covered with non-matching asian bowls with yet more tea bags in them, their packets sitting torn next to the stove. i walk past three canvases stacked to cover one large canvas whose face i cannot bare to look at any longer, ugly and unfortunate, distasteful.

i search for clean socks and brace myself against the day, sitting inside, not seeing the sun, remembering the story of the girl who lived on a planet which only saw sun once every 10 yrs, and then only for an hour. a story i heard when i was a child, which colors my dreams even now.

how when the sun came, the girl was locked up in a closet by her classmates because she was Hated. that it was to be her first time seeing the sun and that she missed her chance to play on shining wet blacktop, which reflected the bright yellow star in the sky.

i imagined her skin translucent pale, paper skin, that if she undid her shirt you would see her heart beating through, the blue of her veins like the veins of a leaf, that her little heart would pound and they would shake like leaf veins do in the wind.

often, i have dreamed of being locked up the closet with her because i am Hated. and when i am, i am young again, her age, the age of my 7th birthday when it was me and my little family.

and she asks me if i am a boy because my hair is short and i am wearing my blue corduroy pants, with the red patch on the knee.

and i ask her if she is a ghost because i believe i can see through her, lips red like halloween makeup, her eyes holes cut from a sheet.

we hold hands and tell stories in the locked up dark, waiting for people to come and let us out, hoping to catch a few last minutes of the sun, wanting to chase the big yellow star across shining wet blacktop, trying to catch its reflection for Next Time.

when we would hold hands in the closet while the others played outside, our own bit of yellow to toss back and forth.

i sit on the edge of my bed and tie my shoes, thinking about how we always would stand up straight, side by side, nervous to see outside while we heard the key pushing into the lock.

a boy/girl with a red patched knee. a ghost/girl with a matching red mouth.