It was Monday and along with cookies, various other snacks were being offered at the coffee shop. Apparently they needed to get rid of some of the food that had been in storage for a while. I picked up a sandwich on my way out. It was potentially a few months old.

I felt a rush of adrenaline as I realized that I wasn’t going to pack up my belongings in time before I had to leave the country. I had only finished a couple of boxes and my room was nowhere near being emptied out. I walked around to the other side of the room so see some half-erased equations on the whiteboard.

I spent my time examining the blue marker graffiti in the bathroom stall before coming out to find a group of students crowded around wooden platform shelf. There was a rather large paperback black book on the shelf with its title Mein Kampf in bold white print. As I went to wash my hands while looking out of the greenish window, the students were having a discussion about the book’s place in our curriculum.

I walked into someone’s house with a group of friends was was led through the commotion that was their family. “Hey Clark” their mom greeted. For some reason or another I responded back in Mandarin before awkwardly terminating the interaction. Our friend unlocked their “game room” before entering because their brother was inside and didn’t want to be disturbed. “It’s like we’re freeing him” I commented.

We had to draw posters for an in-class project and my progress was not going well. I had given my initial idea to someone else, thinking that I would later think of something else on my own. Unfortunately that thought never came as I looked down at my hastily crayoned fence on my paper while being acutely aware that time was running out.

A projector was displaying a film on the wall about a man navigating through the afterlife. He is greeted by someone who claims to be the devil and proves it by pulling things out of an empty cloth bag. The man is unconvinced as he walks away and when he peers around the corner, we see a long hallway that is lit up from heaven at the other end.

We were sitting in the classroom and across from me was someone that I severely disliked. “I don’t like this”, I said, “but there is just something about your face that compels me to frustrate you as much as possible”. I started to break down into tears as I continued to harass this person who might as well have been a stranger at this point. “Aren’t you devastated?” his friend asked.

We got out of the car just when it started snowing extremely hard. The snow didn’t drift but rather pelted down towards the ground in small fistfuls. “Hey where are you all going?” my father asked as we started walking towards the trees and without much thought. It turned out that we were all just following one another and that no one knew where we were headed before turning around to follow my dad. I could see the buildings that were lit up by spotlights on the other side of the river through the snow. As the trees to the left of us opened up, the snow had started massing together to form balloon-like bubbles around the streetlamp. My brother said, “I’m never going to tell [my brother’s ex] that I painted this” and my mother agreed.

We had been playing some kind of co-op Mario game and for some reason I had been separated from the group at one point. We were in a Japanese garden and I had to solve a problem relating to matching the four cardinal directions to signs on a circular stone.

It was the weekend and we were heading to a lunch with my parents. We sat on a small roller cart on rails to move through the hotel/department store. The three of us sat facing in different directions on the square-shaped cart as it turned while it moved. When we had finally arrived at the restaurant, I noticed that I was the only one left on the cart. “Where did they go?” my mother asked. I thought for a moment before deciding that I would go back and search for them myself.