I am spending this early part of Sunday morning finally learning something about the geography of the United States of America. I have managed to absorb all sorts of stereotypes and iconic landscapes (laconic Texans in sheriff's uniforms, fast talking New York cab drivers, ranchers, pioneers, cult leaders, Indians, snow-capped mountains, bayous, seas of prairie-grass, cactus, casinos, border patrols, slavery, obesity, immigrant dreams and nightmares with firearms), all without having any real idea of the shape of the country. Perhaps that's why there's something about it I don't quite recognise, why the idea of America hasn't put down roots in me the same way the idea of Europe has. When I read American fiction I feel a vague sense of alienation; now that I know which side of the country LA is on, maybe it will disappear.

The summer is here, bringing with it lethargy, nakedness and a strange sensation of bodily nostalgia which manifests as a heaviness in the stomach. I feel fuzzy-headed and disinclined to leave the house. Did I really dream of this all winter?

At this particular point in time, I am not very interested in the present. I spend half of my mental life projecting myself into the imaginary future, envisioning myself as a happy and assimilated Polish migrant. I don't think very hard about how this will happen or what it entails; instead I think about the feeling of effortlessness that marks life here, a sort of daily absence of friction, and project it onto the half- known landscape of Warsaw. It is partly a feeling of being half asleep, of being entitled to ignore my surroundings because I have absorbed and internalised them. I currently spend my trips to Poland with eyes like saucers, staring around me and straining with the effort of trying to understand how it looks to its inhabitants.

The other half of the time is spent in the archives of the past. My current self operates as a sort of didactic historian in these circumstances, unearthing strata of old bitterness and old joy, adjusting her pince nez and poking with her tweezers, muttering that's why....... ahh, it's because...... don't you see? This world is like the land of dreams, where I am both myself but not myself. It is a world which- like the dreamworld-makes sense both currently and retrospectively, in two entirely different ways.

The present (at present) is nothing but a zone of synthesis for these forces of history and possibility, a cocoon of routine from which I can safely observe what has been and ponder what might become.