Last night I had difficulty sleeping, a bizarre dream kept poking and prodding at me all night, and for some reason in the midst of this weird half-sleep a short story simply popped into my head. I’ve written it up, literally verbatim from my dream. I have no idea what it means, nor how I was able to retain an entire short story from my sleep, but I figured putting it on the internet couldn’t be the worst move. Maybe you see something in it.

Imagine a girl. She’s extremely attractive, seriously, just take a look. Damn.

Now imagine a café. You met the girl a few hours ago and tomorrow you’re going to ask her out to this café for drinks.

Imagine what will happen with this girl tomorrow. The two of you meet, you get whatever drinks you get, you say what you say, she says what she says, and then something happens and you leave.

Okay, now imagine that she’s someone else. Any other person that this girl could possibly be, and you’re getting drinks with one of them. Perhaps she’s less attractive now, but shares more of your taste in movies. That’s just one possibility.

Now imagine that you’re someone else. She’s chosen to go get drinks not with you, but with someone like you, or perhaps someone who’s nothing like you. Imagine all of these scenarios.

Now imagine that you went and got drinks not tomorrow, but right now. And in a thousand different versions of this story, you got drinks at a thousand different times between now and tomorrow. If you were talking with her right now, what would you say?

What if the drinks you got were different? Would that change your interaction with her? Would she think less of you? More of you?

Suppose halfway through the conversation a bomb destroys the café. Suppose the sun blinks out of existence. Suppose she comes to despise you as a person

Take all of these possibilities, every possible interaction you could have, every person you could be, every person she could be, and how each of these possibilities intersect at this café, where you’re having some sort of drink, and some sort of interaction. So maybe you’re having a drink an hour from now with the person who shares your taste in movies, or she’s having drinks with someone who isn’t you when a bomb goes off.

And because each interaction feels so potent, you want to assign each one an image so that you’ll be able to easily recall it later on. For example, perhaps one of them look like this:

And perhaps another looks like this:

And another looks like this:
[teapot ]

And now you’ve got all these images, and because you can’t find just one to convey your feelings you collapse all of them into a single image, a collage of all of them simultaneously. Because that’s how they exist in your mind, no one image is correct, they all seem to share space with each other in some way

Now you need to show these images to your friends and the people around you, so you get them tattooed all over your body. Wherever people look on you they’ll see these representations of your time getting coffee with this girl. Some will be more obvious and that’s what everyone will see, and some will be hidden. But whomever you interact with, you’ll always have something to show them, and it’ll be nice that you can show them the image without needing to do any more explanation.

This is comforting to you, and because you were so thorough in thinking of every possible situation you could be in with this girl, you know that some part of you is being represented somewhere amongst all of these images.

Isn’t it strange that they all converge on this one café?

Why is that?

Why did you choose to do that?

In every single scenario in your head, they all took place at this café, you had this idea that the two of you met for coffee here, and amongst everything else which is changing, that one thing never does. What’s your attachment to this place?

You don’t have an explanation.

In fact, you’re crying right now.

I ask you why you’re crying. You don’t know.