March 17, 2016

A childhood friend had uploaded a video of us on what seemed to be a roller coaster ride. When my mother saw the video that I was tagged in, she asked me if “[I was] trying to upload a video or dying”. The video failed to load past a certain point and was full of video artifacts and distortion.

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We were in the city and my dad was frantically running around in the rain looking for a public phone. He had lost his and needed to call my mother. My grandfather was also with us and was getting soaked as we were simultaneously looking for bus 635. At some point we walking on the highway against the traffic in search of the bus.

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I had just come out of the shower with a towel around my waist when my mother said it was time to go. I didn’t even put on pants as we walked to a restaurant that my father had chosen but did not make a reservation for. As we turned around a corner of the declining road, we saw a restaurant with a bunch of empty outdoor tables. However, there was still a long line waiting at the front door to be seated. I felt reluctant to sit down as my family helped themselves to a table and my father reassured me that this restaurant had a similar “feel” to the one he was looking for so everything was fine. We hadn’t even ordered anything but we started eating once the food came. “Don’t worry, we’ll eat first and pay later” said my father.

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I was lying on the couch and a television program involving animals was on the screen. I had a dog which I was not familiar with on the leash next to me and to the right was a large open space that seemed to resemble a fish market. I was afraid to let go because I knew that the moment I did, the dog would start jumping all over the place and be hard to manage. A mother passed by and was walking two Japanese macaques and a human child on backpack leashes.

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There was a dog park in the river under the bridge and I was bringing my parents there for the first time. The people playing in the water would sometimes slip and be carried downstream but would eventually manage to swim back to shore and climb up from the river. Everyone convened here on Wednesday and Friday afternoons. “Is it safe here?” my mother asked. I thought about the first and only time I had been here before and had slipped and fallen into the water. I assured them that it was.