I was playing Overwatch and we were defending on the payload portion of Hollywood. Our team was mostly on top of the buildings but I was on the ground. A Hanzo was standing on top of the first archway and I repeatedly tried and failed to shoot/throw a key at him.

I was uncomfortable with getting naked because for some reason I was afraid that my body would reveal my nationality. It wasn’t long before people were having sex in the room while I stood fully clothed in the corner. I walked into the bathroom and looked in the mirror to see that the skin on my face had dried up and become keratinized. I put my hand up to my face and felt lizard-like scales.

We were driving up the east coast of Taiwan and stopped at a resting/scenic spot that overlooked the ocean. There was a reflecting pool with flowing water by the road and my uncle asked, “do you know how this works?” I said of course so he asked me where the water was coming from. I pointed to the pipe at the bottom of the pool. Then he asked where the water was going. I told him that it flowed off the edges before circulating back into the pool. “No. It flows down the cliff as a weapon” he corrected. He said that I was taking things too literally.

He had been excluded from various games and text channels due to verbal abuse and was no longer able to display public statuses. We scrolled through his limited options for communication on his phone as I saw a very different landscape from the one I was used to.

We were walking through a stationery store and someone was testing my Japanese. I labeled an eraser as 「ごみばこ」 (supposed to be 「けしごむ」).

I was walking up and down through our new home until I found my mother checking the master bathroom which was on the ground floor. The room was very large and had windows lined all around. There was a bathtub full of water that had gone brown contained within a tight ring of glass panels. Apparently our neighbors had been complaining about our contaminated water.

The four of us had a section of the wall to decorate in the room. Instead of collaborating on one large piece, we had divided the wall up into quarters to work on separately. I taped a handful of words like “time” and “Simon” onto the board while placing cutouts of printed images of Ironman and Tracer. I looked to my left to see someone taking out the paint which had now clearly marked the borders of our space. I was afraid that I was doing this all wrong. I hastily ripped off the pieces of paper and picked up a newspaper. The headline had something to do with potatoes and I folded it so that was the only thing visible before pinning it onto the board.

As I walked down the stairs and took a seat on the sofa chair, someone turned towards me and commented, “You’ve been down here for a long time.” For some reason, I wasn’t able to respond to him verbally so I sent a message over our group Discord channel: “Is that even a question?”

I had gotten a nose piercing at the hair salon because it was apparently at my father’s request. When I returned home with a large ring in my left nostril he said that I didn’t “get it” and handed me a smaller one that was from a relative. I held onto the ring while taking off my own as we continued to talk near the front door. Someone was coming over to our place soon and I realized that I wasn’t able to find my piercing anymore.

I was looking over at a relative’s laptop screen and they were scrolling through photos of our family on Facebook. My dad pointed to one and said that it was shot it a way that made me look like a model. I looked to my own screen and tried to find the same photo without success.