"However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon. But what do they do then? And there came to my mind's eye one of those long streets somewhere south of the river whose infinite rows are innumerably populated."

Virginia Woolf is a favourite author of mine. A "Room of One's Own," my copy much-thumbed and underlined, is based on a series of lectures that she gave at two women's colleges in the 1920s. She writes of the fact that women need a space of their own in which to develop their gifts and enough money to support themselves. She speaks about women who have been denied opportunities based on their gender. Virginia speaks of the need for personal freedom and the liberty to create true art.

I often feel this. This issue of space. Eighty-some years after Virginia's foray into femininity, I keep my thoughts to myself in class and then wonder about this role that I play. I defer to the male in conversation and I chide myself later, telling myself to take up a little more space and share my opinions. I shrink into the space that I imagine I'm allowed and I have to painfully push myself over the margins and boundaries of my self-inflicted role. I am playing a part that I did not audition for. I look around at the women that I have counted as influential in my life and I see the narrow borders that they have allowed themselves to exist within. We are the doorkeepers to hidden caverns and undefined depths. The problem is that we rarely visit ourselves.

I am not a staunch feminist. Far from it, in fact. I desire a lover, husband, and confidante. I see other women's children and I want a few of my own. I grew up sure in the knowledge that I would have six boys, no girls, although this desire has since diminished. I love to decorate my home and the sound of my knitting needles clacking leaves me feeling serene. Cooking for others gives me pleasure, especially if they like what I am cooking. I am a woman, in every conventional sense of the word. However, I often find myself desiring more for my girlfriends, sisters, mother, aunts. I live alongside them in their dreams and, when those dreams die, I feel profound loss and sorrow for what could have been. Why do these women feel that it is okay to live dreamlessly?

I had four best friends growing up: Cherie, Sara (without an H), Olivia (OB), and Angela. I hated and adored them all by turn. We swung on a revolving door of friendship in which a petty quarrel or mislaid phrase could easily mean a barred entrance to the inner circle, at least for a day or two. We fell in and out of love with each other, trading and bargaining our secrets, poker faces set for those who were not currently in the know. Almost every one of those trading cards had a boy on it: Wesley, Bobby, Darren, Jonathan, Warren. These were the names around which our conversations and lives revolved, but we dreamed much bigger than that.

Cherie. Cherie was the beauty and the sweetheart of our fickle group. Long blonde hair, a perfect hourglass figure, and skin the hue of milk. In my mind, her skin was the "alabaster complexion" that L.M. Montgomery wrote about and Anne Shirley raved over. Cherie's house was the popular place to be for us, mostly because her handsome older brother, Darren, and his friends were always there watching South Park. This blonde beauty dreamed of Africa. Day and night, in and out of whatever quarrels or romances we were currently in, she dreamed of holding African babies, of touching African soil. Cherie's mother dreamed of holding Cherie's babies, of planning her daughter's wedding. At nineteen, Cherie married Melvin, a Mennonite boy. She is twenty-two and pregnant with her second child.

Sara. Sara laughed loudly, talked like a sailor, and wanted to be an opera singer. When we played Robin Hood, she was always the fat, and surprisingly musical, Sheriff of Nottingham and I was her deputy. Sara's Croatian home was always full of people. Foster kids and family members on the down-and-out congregated in the double-wide trailer just down the hill from my own house. The youngest of four children, she was called fatso by her two older brothers and Warren, the cousin that lived with them. As we got older, my friend became restrained, unobtrusive, and less theatrical. When Sara turned twenty-one, her then-boyfriend, a mill-worker, proposed to her over the heaving body of a brown bear, the first she had ever shot. She replied in the affirmative and moved in with him and his eight piranhas. Sara doesn't sing much anymore.

OB. Olivia was a native. In our town, the general belief is that being aboriginal means you hitchhike home drunk every night and arrive back in town the next day, packed alongside thirteen cousins in your great-uncle's welfare pickup, ready to do it all again. When she was three years old, OB burned down part of her apartment complex while playing with her mom's lighter. She was promptly removed from her mother's care and put into foster care, ending up in the Croatian household next door to mine. Olivia lived under false pretences, an Indian in a white man's world, and she always resented this charade. OB dreamed of being free: free of her history, her town's history, and her status between these two poles. She ran away from home when we were nineteen, coming back when she was too strung out on drugs to remember why she was taking them. I never know where Olivia is these days. Every year, I get an e-mail or a phone call asking for money for a bus ticket and a clean bed. My heart breaks, knowing that the money will go towards an addict and not a friend.

Angela. Ang had a pure heart. She was the kind of person that you love and almost hate: she was just that sweet. White blonde hair, huge grin behind her braces, Ang loved to wear fluorescent colors. Neon pink socks, lime green t-shirts, and an adorable gray jumper with geometric shapes in eye-blurring shades of purple, yellow, and orange. A good skier and a lover of all things canine, Angela wanted to be a doctor. Dreamed of it, in fact, and had ever since she was little. I, as her best friend, was her staunchest supporter. In our last year of high school, Ang experienced a bad breakup and got quiet, very quiet. Our whole town noticed and commented on the lack of a boyfriend, lack of a future. Three months before graduation, she started dating again. Two months after we got our diplomas, my eighteen-year old confidante was married to a twenty-six year old named Wes. Ang always asks me to describe university life when I am home over holidays. "It's good," I reply and we move on to talk about babies and house plans.

I often wonder if I cling religiously to the dreams of those I love, long after these women have moved on. This is the funny thing about dreams. They have the ability to change shape and form according to our situations and whims. Dreams are not made of a substance that can be nailed down as clearly as doctor, activist, or even opera singer, regardless of my belief in hidden depths and unexplored caverns. Do these women around me live dreamlessly or have they simply allowed their dreams to change, exchanging missions for motherhood, medicine for marriage? Do my friends simply play the roles that they have been handed without thought? Do they know what they have missed? Or do I just not understand what they have gained?

"For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie."