I started out in some sort of factory. It was almost as if I were sleeping there and just waking up. It was fairly dark in there. The room I was in was huge, and the ceiling was a couple of hundred of feet up. I forget what it was that I was supposed to be doing, but there was something about the big rectangular metal plates attached to the ceiling. We were supposed to be using them to process our real work or something, as if they maybe had lots of pins or spikes on one side of them, and we had to stack things on them, kind of like rings on pins or something. We were supposed to use two at a time, and I remember thinking that I needed to go get someone to get down two of those plates for me.
I got up and went to go find someone, and I wound up walking around through this hallway and winding up in the cafeteria of Stewart Middle School, only it was smaller, but it had the feel of it with only a few of the lights on. (like they used to do in the mornings for breakfast)
While I was in there, I knew I had to be getting back to work quickly, but my watch started beeping. I looked at it, and I realized that I was receiving my email on it. Matthew (brother) had sent me one, but I didn't get a chance to read it. The cafeteria was now about the size of the break room at Mercedes in Fort Worth.
As I looked up from my watch, I saw Aunt Irene and a couple of others there. They were all women family members. One was mom, and another was kind of like Grandma Beddows. I wanted to stop to talk them for a bit, but I knew that if I did, I'd be in trouble. I think I told them I'd talk to them later, and I wound up going down the back hallway, and into a room on the left.
I was now in college. I don't know which college it was, but it was supposed to be back east somewhere, and maybe even up north, like in Vermont. It seems that I had three or four classes, and they were all in the same room, with the same people, and with the same teacher. He was a younger guy, probably right around 30.
My classes were an art class, some sort of music class, English, and possibly something else that I can't remember. The thing is, they weren't really kept separate. Because the same teacher taught all of the classes, and they all happened in the same room with the same people, some of the material would spill over from one class to another.
I remember coming into the class room, and I went to go take a seat. Not everyone was there yet, and I think that most people were supposed to bring their own desks, but they had a few for those of us who didn't have one to bring. I chose one of those and went to sit in it. When I sat in it, it started to slide forward. The floor was actually up on a 45 degree angle. It was supposed to be stadium seating like in those big lecture halls, but instead of all the desks already in place, they could be moved around, and there was no flat surface to put them on. You were supposed to keep the desk placed on the 45 degree angled floor. Somehow they were supposed to lock into place on the floor, but my desk kept sliding. I tried moving my desk from back in the back near the top of the room to right behind another desk of a girl in front of me. The desk kept sliding, and I was going to eventually wind up running into her, so I decided to keep going forward until I had the desk up in the very front of the classroom. I was in the front row, and as a result, I was periodically talking to the teacher about our classwork. I remember he posted up a drawing on the chalkboard at one point, and it was his own, but he was using it to go over a previous drawing assignment.
After a bit, I remember checking my watch, and I had to go. I left and wound up going to some fast food place. While I was there, some of the jocks from my class showed up. They decided to come pick on me because I couldn't get the desk to stay in place during class. The main one looked like Skinner from Degrassi. He was trying to piss me off, but evidently I had some sort of dirt on him, and I wound up bringing it up when he sat down in my booth across from me. It seemed to upset him quite a bit, and he may have even started to cry. I think I had said something about him breaking up with his girlfriend (some chunky black girl) and how she had committed suicide because of him. He finally got up and left.
A little while later, I had gone back to my dorm room, but it was also a school gathering of some sort. A lot of the people from Degrassi were there. I remember being up in this gazebo sort of area that was way up on top of one of the five or six story buildings. I was talking to someone, and then I heard the P.A. system start up. It was Skinner. He cleared his throat, and then he spoke. Whatever he said, it was short and almost too brief. I think he may have just said, "Breakup" and walked off. We all knew that meant he was breaking up with his girlfriend, who this time was a thin black girl. We knew that the same thing was going to happen to her that had happened to the previous girlfriend. She was so distraught that she was going to go commit suicide.
I saw this brief "video clip" fire off in my mind about this whole situation. It went back and showed the first girlfriend finding out. She was walking away from school, and as she passed a fire hydrant and a bunch of people, she fell and dropped her books. She was kind of a glowing greenish white ghost that kept reliving the past. I then saw, briefly, the thin black girl (Hazel from Degrassi?) crying and upset, and she seemed to be turning into the same greenish white ghost that no one could see.
I think my watch beeped again with the email stuff, and I knew that I had to head back home. I got home to Grandmamma Miller's house, and the group of women that I had seen earlier were all there. Aunt Irene, mom, Grandma Beddows, and two others that I can't remember. They were all very happy to see me, and I was very happy to see them. I was giving them each a big hug. I think I gave mom one first, and then Aunt Irene, and then the two women that I can't remember, and then finally Grandma Beddows. I talked with them all for a bit, and I noticed that it was night time out now.
After talking, I told them that I had to go to a doctor's appointment. I left and I went to a podiatrist that was up on Afton Mountain. It was still early morning and very cold out. Technically they weren't even open yet, but they let me in anyway. I walked around and finally found a place to sit back in the back office while the doctor went around and cleaned up. She was also trying to get the place warm, and her assistant wound up turning on some sort of heater in the next room that blew warm air into this room we were in. I was sitting on a couch watching the doctor. She was trying to sweep off this big cast iron thing next to a stove that had a bunch of thick dust and old dry grass clippings on it. She was having quite a bit of trouble with it because it was all so dry that the broom she was using was just moving it around and blowing it around, but not really able to sweep it anywhere. She struggled with it for a while because her thought was that she had to do that in order to be able to start up the stove and warm the place up. When she realized there was a bunch of heat coming in from the heater in the next room, she was thrilled and came over to the couch and took off her shoes and curled up on the sofa.
It was at this point that I really was able to see her to describe her. She had shortish sandy blond hair, and she was wearing a tan or brown business skirt suit and pantyhose. She snuggled up next to me, and the assistant came in and snuggled up on the other side of her. We were all just sitting there enjoying the warmth.
I then realized that there was still a cold breeze coming from the part of the room in front of me where the doctor had been sweeping. The windows were open! I had thought about closing them, but the doctor said that leaving them open was fine.
Then there was a car horn beep, and we looked up, and it was Mike (former step-father), mom, Eric, Matthew (brothers), and a Buddhist monk. They had pulled up right outside the window in Em's (wife) Lancer, and somehow it was floating/flying. They had come to pick us up. When I looked next, the doctor was actually Em, and so we said goodbye to the assistant, and we got into the back seat of the car with Eric.
We took off going down the ridge of the mountain. The road we were on was up on the very top of everything, and so we could see both valleys on either side of us. Em was just thrilled at how pretty it was, and I was telling her that the valley to the left was the one that we live in in Weyers Cave, and the one to the right we called "Grandmamma and Granddaddy B's Valley" because that's where they lived. Em was saying "oooh!" and "Aaaah!" as we were going down the road.
I suddenly realized that we were going way too fast down the mountain, and it turned out that Mike had started looking off to the left at some sort of logging trucks or something, and he wasn't paying attention to how fast we were going, or even WHERE we were going. I realized that the monk was in the front seat, and he was turned around facing us, sitting completely backwards on the front seat, and in the middle. Matthew was in the passenger side, and mom was no nowhere to be found. I was on the driver's side in the back, Em was in the middle, and Eric was on the passenger side. I saw us heading off the right side of the road, and we all yelled to Mike simultaneously. I was really upset at him for not paying attention to his driving. He said something about PetSmart, as if the trucks that he was looking had something to do with it.
He started slowing down and getting back onto the road, but he didn't hit his breaks as hard as he could have. He made a dive to the right as we were passing a parking lot for PetSmart, and I was thinking, "oh great... now we have to stop off here." He still hadn't slowed down enough, and he was trying not to take the corner too sharply. He wound up going across to the left side of the parking lot entrance (wrong side of the road) and continued on driving off of the road.
We were heading into a big area that looked like it was about 3 feet lower than the road, and there had been some recent construction going on there. Mike thought the water was only about 6 inches deep or so, but as I saw that we were heading to it, I knew differently. I knew that it was deep. Really deep. We hit the water, and we immediately sank. It happened too fast for me to even say anything to Mike to avoid it. Everyone started yelling. The car was sinking so fast in the muddy water, and I could see the light fading as we went deeper and deeper.
I could feel the pressure in the car increasing, and I knew it would only be a matter of time before something happened and the car filled with a water. I had a thought that we needed to act quickly and get out all at once, but at the same time, I knew that to coordinate everyone and get everyone to go all at once, was going to be tough, and once we accomplished it, we were going to be down too deep to make it to the surface alive anyway. I remember pushing against the door, and I could tell it was going to be incredibly difficult to open. I knew that we were going to die right there, all together. The feeling of the fear, the loss of Em, dying with Em, and the increasing pressure in the car woke me up.
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