Sometimes she wakes up as someone different. She makes coffee and rubs the sleep from her creases and corners, tries to light a cigarette on the shaft of sunlight refracted through the wavy glass a the top of her kitchen window. Blinking her hair away from her eyes, she pieces together what bits of her feel altered, pulling burnt hairs and faded linen from the fire.
She remembers a blue bridesmaid's dress and a small house in a field. She remembers the feeling of having a second floor above her head in the kitchen and the creak and sway of the sycamore in a high wind. She remembers floating through the summer and sleeping through the winter, the windows rattling like the rafters of a church. She remembers thrown-together picnics and the texture of English leather in her hands.
It's not her life, not a life she recognizes as familiar but it is definitely a part of her, hiding behind the coffee and the faces on the milk carton. If it's a wish it's one from so long ago that it's been crated with the board games and garden tools still left at her parents' house out west.
Her LPs stayed there, too.
And her saddle.
And her father, buried so long ago that she remembers his illness over his touch, remembers the smaller and smaller houses in neighborhoods farther and farther from home.
She remembers this, peering at the chips missing from the rim of her mug as her coffee slowly lightens with cream.