I am here. I am gone. Tomorrow I leave for my writing retreat and try to untangle my mind from the usual dull but dizzying experience of sitting in my parents house all day. I have to take the loathing I feel here (not for my family but for this place) and shift the burden to my character's shoulders. I have to pull myself out of the immediate sloth and blind determination to just get through that I feel as soon as I cross into Andover's borders. Tomorrow, I am free and become not a daughter or a granddaughter or an aunt (three generations in this house today, one bathroom). I become a writer again.