I was a housewife. I do not know if you will now say, 'I do not know what that is.' And if I told you in simple terms, you might then reply, 'today, we have machines for what you once did.'
You can be certain that I was no machine but if it pleases you, I can explain my life as if I had been. I was like a homeostat, I regulated the confines of my world. My world was like the Sea of Talmud.
I interpreted the waters of the world, and you could say I governed them according to my purpose. I was every tributary of every delta which flowed into the sea. And I was the sea. And I was also an evaporation which caused the sea to not overflow, returning flows to the land. I was a sea as a sea is like a temple.
There were doors in, and a chimney out. But now, picture the sea as if it were not made of water but of a beloved smoke. Imagine I was a seed, or a distant awareness, at the centre of some protective froth or jelly... and from my position I channelled smokes, vapours, gases along conduits, up chimneys, down vents and through ducts. I summoned the vapours, I dismissed them. I whisked them together and I separated them out. I governed them.
I was the invisible hand of my own smoke-world. The world rotated day and night for many years, it was contained within itself. And you might think that a machine could regulate things just as well as I, but I did not only respond to build-ups and depletions. I did not simply maintain the impossible equilibrium, reactively. I was not a caretaker. I am not talking of the duties associated with a boiler room that you might be familiar with.
As time passed, I slowly became aware that I was in possession of a divinely allowed capacity for the prediction and anticipation of flows. My interventions were creative. I found I was able to mould flows to my will before they had even emerged. In this sense, I perceived myself to be an angel of the confines of my existence.
I do not know what happened to my world. Perhaps the flows were dispersed, and I was no longer needed... or I fell out of the world and now am unable to return. I do know that I am no longer within it.
For a long time, I have been confined to a single room. And I am now restricted to a still smaller space by a recent accident that has befallen me and which even I did not anticipate. The accident was ridiculous, like all accidents, but I can no more free myself from its consequences than I could have done if it had been a trap deliberately for me.
It occurred one night, whilst I prepared for sleep. I had bound myself tightly in my blanket as I usually did but then, upon lying back and waiting with my eyes closed, I could not prevent my rolling off the edge of the bed and onto the floor next to the wall.
When I woke the next morning, I found I was stuck fast between bed and wall. My blanket was still wrapped around me, further restricting my limbs. Since the accident, I have been unable to discover, with the limited options available to me, a means for righting myself. I have now lain here for several days.
