[Inside]All around me, in this double-wide trailer, is my extended family. I didn’t feel any shame, and am having a good time. My mother’s mother treats me like a twelve-year-old, which she always does. Pleasant warmth.

[Outside]No shame meant that I was no longer what the nastier part of my inner dialogue wants to call a “worthless bum”.

[Inside]I left the trailer, still filled with the pleasant warmth. I was picked up in a car, and it had three other people in it. I knew that this was my family, as well. The pleasant warmth was sustained by family. One of the occupants of the compact car reminded me of , but I couldn’t tell you why or who was driving the car.

[Outside]I was not driving the car, and this is somehow important.

[Inside]I was dropped off at a party that resembled a birthday party I attended in Japan. I was surrounded by women, and the warmth was only reduced mildly.

[Outside]All the people there were girls I’d known in high school.

[Inside]The conversation turned to my love life, and lack thereof. It felt like the usual turn of affairs, almost natural that I didn’t have a significant other.

[Outside]It felt much like the three years in which I’d had no significant other, only without the urgency and panic.

[Inside]The question was posed to me by a girl I’d had a crush on, and this amused me pleasantly. She was half Asian, half German, tall, and thin. Her face was pockmarked with acne scars, and this didn’t trouble me.

[Outside]She’d never had acne in high school. Somehow this brought her off of the pedastal I’d placed her on in High School.

[Inside]I’d asked her out once and she had turned me down. She said that it had been a mistake, and that she ought to rectify it.

[Outside]When I awoke, I remembered that the action of asking her out and getting turned down had actually happened in a previous dream.

[Inside]I was picked up again by the same compact car, and we drove around the town admiring old buildings and new green in the city.

[Outside]This is where I woke up.