I was moving into another room in the same house by the front door. My dad was sitting on my new bed watching a news report about a group of student activists on television. My mom was figuring out how to reset the “smart toilet” in our house and create a new user profile.

Today was some sort of orientation day for the new workplace and I was the first one to arrive. I greeted people as they started trickling in and some of them took it as an opportunity to strike up a conversation. A couple of people were talking in Mandarin much too quickly for me to understand them but I felt too embarrassed to ask them to repeat themselves and simply nodded.

I was watching a friend’s Twitch stream while being in a Discord call in the middle of a party. The connection was cutting out so I got up from the sofa for break. I thought about the pizza I was hoarding in my room upstairs and realized that it was probably unnecessary; seeing how I wasn’t as hungry as I thought I would be this far into the day.

I had been asked to write a 60-70 page paper for someone about an open question posed by some academic article about “Renin” and treatment methods. It was meant to be done over a few nights, but 4 years later - I was still working on it. I had delayed this person’s graduation and for some reason they still haven’t failed their course and was still waiting for this paper.

My last semester of classes were starting soon and I had stayed in the dorms over the break. Some familiar faces had been moving back in throughout the morning. Someone asked me if I had seen their model car anywhere. They said it was a yellow Beetle on a black stand that they had left in one of the rooms here “5? 6? Maybe 7?” years ago. I told them that I couldn’t help them as all I knew was that this used to be the room my cousin stayed in.

I was playing Apex Legends in the morning because there was a new patch. I was playing as Pathfinder with some friends from high school.

The shower room was crowded and I was searching for an empty stall. I overheard some people talking about the impact having a little brother had on their life. An interface of emotional reactions in a blue frame came up for me but some options were blocked off.

I was playing a Elemental Blade Flurry character in Diablo II when I realized that it was lacking all of the quality of life changes Path of Exile had. I had to reactivate my buffs and resummon my minions in every new zone I walked into. The waypoints were fickle as the window would open and close quickly at every slight twitch of the cursor after clicking them.

The three of us were in a free-for-all snowball fight in the meter-deep snow. The now-abandoned park was surrounded by brick walls on all sides. Every now and then, I would see a shadow at the foot of some of the trees. I tried to bring this to the attention of the others but they wouldn’t listen until I started hearing voices. I didn’t want to stay here any longer.

I woke up to the sound of my own voice. I looked at the phone in my hand to see that I had been in a call over Messenger with a friend for 43 minutes. Apparently we were in the middle of talking about recent changes in Team Fortress 2 and Apex Legends. I continued the conversation until the 50 minute mark before revealing that I had in fact been asleep for a good portion of the call and had no recollection of whatever it was that we were discussing.