I’m at a basketball game, which is odd because I’m not into sports of any kind. I’m sitting out as part of the team, watching my side get humiliated. The opposition is way better and they are trying to make us look foolish and weak. I crouch down next to a teammate and express my frustration. “They’re at least 3 times better than we are. Look at the way they are attacking, they just wait with that huge guy and we can’t do anything about it. Then they play around a bit to show that we are inferior.” My teammate explains how wrong I am and tells me that we are about to win.
I don’t really follow what he’s saying. It’s sports talk and I never understood the rules well enough to follow.
There’s a very pretty girl in the crowd, next to me.
I walk out of the building and realize I’m at a University. It seems to be in some other country; the architecture is like nothing around here. The school museum has a giant circular garden in the front, raised up in a concrete cylinder. The plants in the garden are appearing and disappearing to make patterns. At one point they show a graph representing the successful implementation of a drinking fountain placed outside of the local amphitheater.
I’m fascinated by the plants existing and not existing at will and only the girl from the game breaks my concentration. She looks a little like Anne Hathaway only younger and prettier. We began walking together and she mentioned that I would get in trouble if I took her home because she was under 21. I thought that was a strange thing to say, since she was obviously over 18. I explained to her my open marriage and that it wasn’t a problem. My wife isn’t the jealous type.
She became quite strange then and started opening up all kinds of personal firewalls. She told me how her friends would hate her if she ever got involved with a married man, open or not and that she couldn’t deal with her own life. I talked her down from hysteria, explaining that her friends didn’t control her life and if she felt so insecure around them, she needed knew friends. Again she opened up more and started talking about how downloading blog themes that related to suicide was a certain equivalent to a cry for help and she had already done that. She alluded that if she were to go home and be alone, she might not be around tomorrow.
I didn’t realize she would be such a broken friend but I took her home to see my wife and brother (Silas lived with us in a large house in this world).
On the way there I tried to get the girl to use Skype. It’s wonderful, encrypted chat and phone calls, you can call me any time on it. Later in the house, I was carrying a little cup of half salt, half water. It was somehow a replacement for my phone but because of it’s lack of keys, I could only hear the other person–I couldn’t talk back…