I was outside on an elevated porch or patio, talking with a girl I’d never met before, during a modest sized house party.  We were just exchanging words casually and somehow got to talking about general attitudes people have about how to behave in relationships.  I said something like “…and who would want to see each other everyday?” which was in reference to the earlier phases of the relationship and in the context of understanding what was best for the chances of long term success.  It was echoing the sentiment of something like the adage, Don’t put the cart before the horse.  She seemed to hold eye contact a bit longer after I said that to see if I was actually serious about it, since I had said it in a somewhat dead-pan way, but with a bit of smirk as well, so it was perhaps somewhat ambiguous whether I meant it as simply a mocking of popular attitudes, or was I more cynical?, essentially implying that everyone was a total sucker for adhering to some default position of “When I’m with someone I want to be with them as much as possible.”  (Addict-much hahaha)  In my mind I was trying to be playful and truthful at the same time, making a bit of a joke of the contrast between the truth– that no one is perfect, people have idiosyncrasies, weird-but-forgivable ways of doing things, and sometimes it’s best to take a bit of space– so it’s important to have an independent existence outside of relationships… and yet, how often do people fall into the assumption that every spare moment must be spent together?  So, these things I find funny.

Then suddenly I went inside and a girl I know from a coffee shop, Harriet, had apparently overheard some of my comments and had taken huge offense.  She immediately started openly bad-mouthing me to the other people there.  I was a bit surprised, and was like hold-on, hold-on, what’s this about?  She apparently had assumed that my comments were negative attacks on people she knew, like a particular cousin of hers; in her mind I was making unfair generalizations about people she cared about, so that ‘triggered’ her.  I was a bit confused, saying I didn’t know her people closely, held no negative attitude toward them– and, by-the-way, how did what I said actually pertain to them?  She tried to say something but it was basically word salad.  I lasted about two severely butchered sentences, then interjected “So, you got nothin’ here?” implying that she had just projected quite a bit on what I had said in order to create drama, based on nothing but her existing bias.  I then felt angry myself, since she felt compelled to try to ruin my reputation with our mutual friends despite having no real basis for the complaint against me.  So I scolded her intensely– a dressing down, but not a total lambasting, basically calling her out for lacking integrity.

Then I went downstairs in this multi level townhouse/apartment, where apparently a monkey had followed me.  I sat down next to a bed where some raccoons were hanging out, and the monkey seemed intent on antagonizing them.  So there was quite a scrap amongst them for a brief moment, but the monkey fled, seemingly more interested in following me than messing with the raccoons.  I went toward an adjacent room; the monkey got ahead of me by going through the doorway first; before I turned into the room I knew he was swinging wildly and bouncing all over the place with really high energy.  I felt the need to get him out of there before everything got destroyed, so I opened a sliding door to the backyard area, and again his eagerness to get ahead of me prevailed, so he went outside before I stepped out.  I remember feeling a quick pang of guilt as I shut the door; he was just an innocent thing who couldn’t control himself, and now would be out in the elements on his own.  How would he fare?  I paused for a moment, then saw him eating kibble out of the bowl of cat food on the patio.  Oh boy, at least he wouldn’t starve.

There was a transition to me swimming in a cove or sound; it was ocean water with some land protecting it on two sides, and I was headed out toward open water, with a baby in tow.  I was swimming freestyle stroke, and there was something casting shade over the water where I was, like perhaps it was afternoon and the shadows were getting longer.  There was also someone, a girl, swimming out in front of me who was staying just in front of the line between afternoon sun and evening shade.  I imagined that with enough pace one could stay in the sun the whole way.  The shape of the shade was like a tall mound, so I was able to get into the sunny area by just moving to the left about 25 yards.  In my mind there was the intention to get somewhere, like Catalina Island, but as I swam I wondered if I had the stamina to get all the way, and I wondered if it was worth worrying about great whites where I was at the time.  I figured that the sharks were most likely not in this inner area, more likely out in open water. I focused on my stroke and noticed that my hands were ‘stabbing’ the water at angles rather than extending like an arc all the way out in front.

Then the focus changed to the idea that I had booked a trip to Hawaii, and the flight would be the red-eye that night around midnight.  The current time was then around 5:00 pm, so the thought was about what to do in the meantime.  I suddenly arrived back at the townhouse where I had been before, in the lower area inside from the patio where the monkey had been locked out. Harriet was there.  I guess it had been some time since our prior conflict, and things were ‘copacetic’-enough, so we had a nice kiss which was followed by some quick pecks on her neck.  I sat at the kitchen table and said something like “I’m glad we were able to move past that rift from the other day”– imagining our time in Hawaii together would be fun so long as we were both feeling good about how it was going, relationship-wise.  Then suddenly some tall-dark-and-handsome guy who I didn’t recognize, but just knew he was an ex-boyfriend of hers said “Yeah, that’s the thing…she says it’s all good but isn’t really all the way there.”  I looked up at her curiously, and she conceded the statement was true, saying something like the first kiss was nice enough, but each subsequent peck induced some feeling of squeamishness, which she described with a scrunched face and making the “errrrmmmmm” sound.

That was news to me!  I immediately said “OK this whole Hawaii trip is off!”  I immediately got my phone out to try to cancel my flight reservation, wondering if they were non-refundable tickets.  I checked the site and got the number for the customer service.  I called and got into some automated system and had to enter my reservation number to get through, but the code was really complicated.  It had several things that all looked like asterisks, but were slightly different, and my phone keypad was very peculiar, with half the buttons resembling the old flip-phones where each number had three letters and the pound and star buttons were for punctuation.  Also, there were several different star buttons that were like thin raised gray rubber columns.  So I knew this was going to be quite a process, since it was likely that it would take several attempts to get it right– I’d probably have to enter and re-enter the code several times.

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