I was visiting a friend. D. W., whose childhood home was now nothing like I remembered. It was fantastic in every way.

I walked into a room that was like a bridge at just above water level over a beautiful stream overhung by lush trees and vegetation. For a long time, I basked in the beauty and the feeling the perspective gave me, and wondered at how anyone could live so nonchalantly in such a house without being mesmerized by this fantastic sylvan view and the feelings it evoked.

I found myself in the living room, which the stream bisected. While indoors, you could walk in the stream, or soak your feet in it, or just admire it. It was so lovely that I could not stop telling D. W. how moved I was by where she lived. Prosaic soul that she is, she was both bewildered and bemused by my emotional response to something she experienced as an ordinary, everyday part of life. She asked me when I had become so blubbery over such unimportant things, as though I had changed. I told her that when I had gone to college I had spent most of my time and money taking photographs, even skipping classes to do so. [Not in reality.] She gave me a pitying look even as I looked longingly at the stream wending its way through the living room and under the room I had been in earlier. It lapped around the house, which did make me nervous.

At this point, I had to go to the bathroom, so I started to look for one. The house was enormous, although it had a cozy feel, and I came to an odd wing with open bathrooms at several points — open, with no doors. Somehow I knew that this was where her brothers lived, so I was reluctant to use any of them and expose myself more than I already had.

They and their friends found me and asked about a sweater I was wearing that looked similar to one of their mother’s. I took it off and looked at the tag; it was from a different store than hers.

Suddenly, I was someone from work, who said he was expecting a visit from a former employee who had been terminated. I liked the former employee and said so, although later I realized that this would make me look bad in the same way as my emotion about the house on water did.