We were playing a game that resembled a kind of first-person Rimworld. I got a message from a friend saying that he was struggling to stay awake. He told me in advance which characters he wanted to romance in the village up ahead in case he fell asleep before we arrived.

We got off the metro and walked towards the main road beneath the underpass. We called out to a taxi in the middle of a line of cars waiting for the traffic light as we cut across the oncoming lane. I slid towards the car with my belly facedown on an elevated skateboard (it was about the height of a food trolley).

The road was packed with people who were there to watch a concert that was being held at an intersection. The three of us were just trying to get to the other side of town but a line of policemen were blocking the way. We tried to explain to them that we were just passing through and weren’t here for the concert. Running out of patience, we eventually pushed through the line and crowd onto the near-empty boulevard.

My cousin and I were standing at the window of our apartment while a typhoon was raging outside. We were watching a crow push some logs around the balcony which eventually formed a bridge to the roof across from us. There was a basket of apples on the other side.

I opened the cover of the piano that was sitting on the balcony. I assumed that the heat and long periods of neglect were responsible for the keys having been warped and discolored. A thin film was peeling off of the keys on the right side. I sat down and started fumbling around the keys until I rediscovered the opening notes to Itsumo no Fuukei, a song that I used to play often. My sister-in-law, who was inside the house, overheard me playing and popped out to ask me to show her how to play it. I felt a little embarrassed about forgetting how the bass notes went. I went back indoors to look for my old sheet music but was unable to find it among all the loose papers.

We were walking back home together when we saw a friend sitting on a bench playing a phone game. He seemed to ignore us while we passed by. “Wow, you’re so attached”, my friend said.

I was in the buffet area on the first floor of a hotel. There was a large crowd of people milling about. Sometimes a person would fall to the ground before getting back up a few moments later as a seemingly different person. There was a slow moving wave of people forgetting who they were as they reawakened with more irritable personalities. I asked my friend about her note-taking system and if that was the key to staying sane. She said that she felt like it helped. We sat on the steps by the wall and scanned through her notebook together. I wrapped my arm over her shoulder.

A coworker was showing me an acceptance letter he had received from a college abroad and wanted me to help translate it for him. However the e-mail seemed to be from a personal address instead of an institution. I looked at the top of his browser to see a bunch of open Google Translate tabs. The content of the e-mail itself was rather informal and even asked about what kind of anime he liked.

We were on a road trip through the middle of America and we stopped by the highway to look at a giant rock formation in the desert. My cousin’s friend was re-registering her iPhone as we sat at a picnic table. The process required her to not only set up face and and retinal scans but also provide some form of photo ID. She set a huge cardboard replica of her California driver’s license onto the table to take a picture of it.

Class had ended early and my classmates were using the extra time to start on their math homework. I took out my laptop and launched Ableton to look over my works in progress. For some reason whenever I got to the end of one timeline, it would seamlessly transition to another file which caused a bit of confusion. I really only wanted to focus on the latest track, which was supposed to be a recreation of a deceased artist’s work in progress. The notes for the original score mentioned prominent use of a manual coffee grinder and I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to implement it. I held a golden coffee grinder in my hands and someone nearby asked me how I intended to play it. The notes from the artist weren’t very illuminating.