I have
Ben over at my house, and we're commenting on the time. It is near eleven p.m., and yet he is still at my house. His
parents are not there to get him. We try to call them, but this isn't working. So I leave him in my house, and get on a bus to
Columbia, where he moved here from, a 3 hour drive.
Once in Columbia, I don't know where I'm going, but I have some vague idea of where everything is at. There is a large residential zone, where I'm at, and due to the inclimate weather, I'm thinking it was summer. I'm standing at his door, and his parents are not there. So I look across the street and think that perhaps I can go over there and use their phone to call home. Only the house across the street doesn't look like the house that was really across the street from his house, but rather one of the houses from my mom's neighborhood, these large two-story houses with gardens in the front yard. He lived in some sort of retirement area, and I walked down through the residential area to his old school. I couldn't figure out if the school would be open on a Sunday, so I just stood there on the steps for a moment, looking back at the road. The school was right on the road. I then went inside, and there it was, some poorly-lit school and police officers standing on a line observing me, students walking around, people who knew from just looking at me that I was not from around here. They snickered as they passed me by. I didn't know what I was looking for. I was afraid to go anywhere, in fear of getting lost. Everything in the school is blue or gray. Or blueish-gray.. slate blue. And there is a large circular table and weird marble busts of things with lots of curves and surrealist artworks and things I have never seen in schools before.
So I leave the school, and I walk until I get to this shopping plaza. You know, with the grocery store, the drug store, the bad CD store, the video store, either a pizza place or a Greek restaurant, and some other weird interest-based stores. I went into the last store in the plaza, a store called Sew Business (which I have actually seen somewhere in the past few days. I just don't know where)
The academic team coach is in there, and I tell her about my dilemna. She laughs at me and says, "You came all the way to Columbia to find Ben's parents? What is WRONG with you?!" I leave, and I somehow get home. Ben is gone. I ask where he went, and my dad's girlfriend says to me, "Oh he left hours ago."
I get this feeling of rue, and start kicking around some wad of paper on the floor, sad. Then my dad says that we are moving. We go to a large storage room and we take inventory of everything we own or have ever owned. Everyone is running about looking at all the things they owned years ago and have not seen, but I'm not really interested. At some point, I want to find a bin of my old Legos, but I give up eventually and just stop caring. I wake up.