We had plans to play a free-for-all paintball game in the forest. It had cost us 500 total to rent all the equipment and the venue for the day. We were advised to imagine a river flowing through the woods in times of stress.

I was sitting in for a meeting for a club on campus dedicated to making fansubs for anime. Our aim was to provide subs with the perfect balance of localization and faithfulness to the source material. Just the research department of the group consisted of 35 students. The latest batch that they had released were subs for K-On, many years late.

A friend was asking the group what we would think if hypothetically the Earth was ruled by an alien empire. I said that I would be fine with such an arrangement, provided that these rulers were competent. However some other people disagreed with me on principle that we shouldn’t be governed by another race.

We were on our way home and my brother suggested that we take a detour to check out a construction site. My mother declined to which my brother asked “what, you don’t like exploring?” She ended up changing her mind and the four of us walked onto the plaza. They were building a new Swarthmore campus next to the Disneyland in the middle of the city.

The middle of the street was filled with highschoolers waiting for the public bus. The street was so crowded that we couldn’t cross until we got to a main intersection. My parents were asking me about college but kept accidentally addressing my brother instead. He looked upset by this. I told them that my life mostly consisted of eating, studying, and sleeping. I told them about a dinner we had with faculty during orientation and how we met our “creators”.

I was finally back at my parents place and decided to take a shower. When I walked into my bathroom however, I found that the entire floor was lined up with shampoo bottles. Not wanting to relocate all of the bottles, I walked over to use my parents’ bathroom. I needed to use the toilet too so I brought something from my room to read.

I was visiting my brother’s family and they had a sepia piano mat in the middle of their living room. I started to improvise on the mat and keys corresponded perfectly to how things sounded in my head. I ended up playing something resembling classical music.

She was moving on with her life, she wrote on their blog. All traces of me had been removed from her social media - barring the one post that was made specifically to announce this fact. It’s not like anything had changed - it had already been years since we had been in contact so I couldn’t understand why I was seeing this now.

I was looking at the trees through my window as the sun was setting. A large holographic keypad was in front of me and I was trying to figure out what it did. Whenever I entered 4 7 (which were actually in the 1 and 5 positions, respectively), I would look up to see that something about the leaves outside had changed. “This is why fall is spook”, I said aloud.

We were watching anime projected onto the wall of my room and I was falling asleep. “I’m sorry, I can’t”, I said as I struggled to keep my head up. We were only 15 minutes into the hour long movie. I collapsed into the pillow beside me only to immediately wake up feeling parched.