earlier, John's alarm was going off. he was somewhere else. not around to shut it off. standard alarm noise. BRONK BRONK BRONK. oh so familiar to probably so many of us before the advent of cell phone alarms. now we all use our cell phones.

anyway.

I heard it, I listened to it and had this sweeping terror I was about to wake up in 2003. As though the past seven years had been a dream , but had still happened. Faintly, I could feel the way a dream pulls when you realize you're sleeping.

Part of me wanted to let it take me. But I panicked. What would I do? How would I go about my life? Would I give up on the good parts of that romance to look for this one? We wouldn't be ready. Would I abandon that life and live the one I wish now I'd been living then? Could I? Or would I still be caught in it. Would anyone believe me? Or would I be a stranger in my own history? More familiar than I should be with the events of the future

what am I even talking about? strange Sunday morning.

if I ever woke up screaming in 2003, I know now where we overlap. Have you done this? Do you do this? Do you visit your old apartment and stay awhile? I have distinct moments. Visiting myself. Making peace in the future comforts myself in the past. I write in my diary in 2007 about a moment in my past. Everything is okay, I tell myself. I feel the peace and the pain now as I did then, while writing it, I felt the open connection in myself between those points in time. I sat at that table sobbing and listened to the woman telling me everything was going to be okay. I listened to her and I believed her even though I didn't want to because I could hear my own self whispering it in my ear.

It is all one long string. I practice it when I am walking. I tune into the stream. I watch myself walking. I see all the motion in one sweeping blur

Coincidences mean nothing and everything. Kevin and I looked at yearbooks yesterday. I ended up pointing out all the people who had died. Two of them were next to each other. I told him the short story of Nick Rose. Not the story of Will O'Brien (a story which fits into this conversation well; magic, and chapters). It all made him sad. He gave me a stuffed bear that was his as a child.

I logged into myspace for the first time in who knows how long. Two weeks ago I got a friend request from my brother's old girlfriend Amy. Little Amy. My father or I would take the blue pickup truck--my brother wasn't old enough to drive--we'd sit down the street and wait for her to sneak out of her house. She'd hang. We'd take her back before morning. We were a family of miscreants. Well intentioned. Everyone comes to the party. I got in trouble once, in the beginning of my own romance. I'd picked up Amy, dropped her off at the house and gone to a couch in a place where the walls were covered with carpet. It was dark and delicious and nearly summer, the air was warm and thick. I didn't know it was 5 in the morning. No one could reach me, we didn't have cell phones then. My father was furious. What if Amy's dad had woken up and found her not at home? What then? Also, it was a school night. Morning. school morning at that point.

The argument was ridiculous.

I haven't approved her friend request. She is older now, her hair is longer, I looked at her photos, she drinks a lot. She is in love with a strange looking older man. I question her motives. But I question everyone and everything.

I got a call yesterday, too. My yearly call from one of my oldest friends. Oscar. I've known him since the fourth grade. The conversation was short. I called him back, I didn't pick it up at first. I don't talk to people. But I called him back.

Hi how's Minnesota.
Good how's North Carolina.
Are you married yet?
No; still haven't found that love you so deeply desire?
No, how's your mom, do you talk to anyone else?
No, but sometimes we like each other's statuses on facebook or I chart where they're going on foursquare. You kind of have a North Carolina accent.
I'm thinking about moving back to Florida.
Do you have a dog? I can send you some food samples. Anything new? No?
It was nice to talk to you.

This is all over the place and still it sticks together. When I click on random lately, on my own diary, it keeps me mostly in the last two years, usually only this year. It keeps me from digging, it knows I get haunted. I stay out of other people's pasts for the same basic reason and luckily now, it's not easy to access. But today, with my musings, I decided to peek, after I started writing this, after I thought I'd wake up in 2003, I entered his name after "random=" and was deposited into something random about carpet covered walls and the music that came through that cave. And that was all I needed, the coincidence.

There are random moments, though I've made peace with the whole, that still serve to press against my soul. I used to torture myself with these types of moments, all from that house in Dunedin--and the memory today, too--once I prank called my mother and she was weird about it. I also ate a nutrigrain bar she'd wanted to eat. She was mad. She had problems. She doesn't remember these things. I do. I used to think of them and be filled with overwhelming torturous guilt. Sink myself into despair with scraps of things that had happened that mean absolutely nothing in the greater scope of my life.

After we moved from that house I would still go back to visit our neighbors, Dawn and John. I liked hanging out with adults when I was an early teen, more than I liked people my own age. John made a bet with me once that my first boyfriend and I would break up when he went to college. We didn't. I collected money on that bet. We doubled down for the next year, when I went. I lost that bet. I didn't go back to visit until 2005, I went to see Dawn just before my dad died, it was as though no time had passed, she showed me the pool. I'd never forgotten the bet, I left the 20 dollars on the table. John worked at the funeral home, of course. I saw him a couple days before the funeral. He'd been the one to pick up the body from the freezer. Or however that works. He made me take the money back. In the parking lot. He looks like Chazz Palminteri, except.. less. Subtly, he looks like Chazz Palminteri and he, in the parking lot of the funeral home where I was answering questions about the planning of the ritual gathering to mark the ending of my father's life, pushed a twenty dollar bill into my reluctant hand, refusing to collect on that bet. Okay.

But I really feel bad when I think about the original ten dollars. Sean and I spent it on cheeseburgers. I collected that money and I spent it on cheeseburgers and we ate them.

That whole story has its own dusty shelf in my soul-store.

What the fuck? Why for? If I could enter my own body, enter my own soul; if I could go back in time, if I could speak to the future

and this is the problem. This is the real problem right now

right now I don't know who is in the future. she has no name and no face and I don't hear her voice.

She hasn't told me anything.

So I don't know where we're going.

So I look in where I've been.