Picking up from where I left off seems to be the best way to proceed. When I start at the beginning, I tend to fabricate and conflate fiction with actual dream content.
As with all of my convoluted dream quilts, I'm having to patch disparate images together into a less than cohesive broader image, and I fear it will not produce anything but some variegated, random thumbnails.
A waifish, Winona Ryder-esque girl in her twenties flashed a toothy smile as she dispelled accusations of Nazi affiliation that had recently cropped up during a conversation between a group of locals and some passersby in a city park. The group, of which I guess I was a part, not by choice but by proximity and happenstance, consisted of the girl, my mentally compromised roommate and some random kids who functioned as NPCs, their sole function being that of rumor adjudicators: "Yes, I heard that!" or "No way. That's a lie."
In this instance, they were taking both sides of the "She's a Nazi" debate with regard to the pretty, petite brunette in the muddy pants, and I found myself quite interested in the outcome. I had fallen into her company only recently, and being starved for good conversation, I was stumbling over myself to try to impress her, recent Nazi allegations notwithstanding.
We'd met in a tunnel, a sewer pipe adjacent to a condemned ramshackle
ranch house that I shared with my de facto roommate, a bipolar
schizophrenic with suicidal tendencies.
<stitch incoming>
This guy. I don't generally like to paint with such a coarse brush, but I can characterize him with only a couple of words: unstable meathead. Low forehead, narrow field, deep-set predator eyes and a loose Brillo of curls that looked like a bad perm recently freed from the confinement of a hairnet. You know the type. A walking posterboard for jock itch who probably owned several sweat-stained MAGA hats.
During his most recent suicide attempt, I'd tried to talk him off a cliff, but he jumped anyway, landing in a shallow creek, seemingly none the worse (or better) for the experience.
"Come on in!" he called up in an oafish bellow, taunting me from the abyss. "It's not too bad."
As I looked over the cliff at my indestructible psychopathic roommate in the creek, I noticed that the tide was rolling in. The creek had morphed small stream to a sizable inlet that fed into a bay, and waves from the outer ocean were making an incursion into the normally still waters. My roommate scrambled up the rocks as breakers, ever increasing in height, threatened to wash us both off the cliff.
<stitch>
Back in the tunnel, where my still dripping roomie was having yet another self-induced, mumbly meltdown, I spied the brown haired girl. She was trying to find a quiet place to read, or so she said. Were she an actual Nazi, or someone attempting to evade detection, I guess hiding out in a tunnel might make sense. But with my now howling roommate making the less than ideal situation untenable, I found my icebreaker.
"I know of a better place than this, if you don't mind cobwebs, a leaking ceiling and a few missing floorboards here and there," I said beckoning with a flourish to a dilapidated structure just outside of the tunnel's opening.
"I don't mind," she said and promptly stepped in a mud puddle, soaking the cuffs of her balloon pants up to the ankles with thick brown slop. She carried herself with such grace that this didn't seem at all out of the ordinary. To the contrary, such was her magnetism that one would almost feel compelled to soil their own shoes in solidarity. Almost.
I sidestepped the puddle and led the way through a series of rooms and corridors, each more chaotic and disheveled than the last. Wires to flickering florescent fixtures hung low, and the ceilings and walls were partially caved in. The floor was mostly dirt, some of which was wet from the leaking roof or possibly from the nearby sewer pipe. This made the trek uncomfortable in the places where one had to crawl due to the collapsing ceiling.
"There doesn't appear to be any furniture," I apologized weakly.
"Oh, that's all right. I'll just use this blanket here," she said, pointing to a remarkably clean and dry blanket in the middle of a cave-like open area where some natural light managed to filter in through the broken slats of the wood and plaster wall.
I liked her moxie. I would not have to feign opulence to gain her favor. She seemed to be unperturbed by the generally squalid conditions and was able to genuinely frame the less than ideal circumstances in a positive light.
"I'm a blanket kind of girl anyway," she said in a way that left room for hopeful inference from me.