Mr Li (driver for the foreign teachers in the college where I work in China) picked me up from somewhere. It was a parking lot. I had luggage. He wasn't driving the school van. It was a four door sedan. I don't remember the color.
I had a red rolling suitcase. As I was loading it, he said something, I don't remember what, but it made me uncomfortable. I am not easily shaken, so whatever he said must have been pretty significant. The weirder part is, Mr Li doesn't speak English (he understands it IRL, so I think he can, he just doesn't). Whatever he says, I am able to understand it.
We pull up to a stop in front of my childhood home. The house is still standing (it was demolished IRL almost 20 years ago). I get out of the car and start berating Mr Li for what he said and "the energy you were expressing towards me made me uncomfortable." I don't think he responded, but I was wigged all the way out.
I take my suitcase and close the trunk. I walk towards the house. He drives off before I get in the house. The door is not the same as I remember. It's on the same part of the house (the left side of the porch as you face it). I get into the door, it is painted green on the inside (this doesn't feel right, but I don't remember the door color from my youth). I am worried that Mr Li is going to come back and harm me, so I close the door behind me, but it is in such bad shape I don't feel secure. I lock it on the handle at the left side of the door (facing it from the inside). The hinges on right side of the door are barely hanging on, so much that I can see outside. I pull the door closer to the jamb and use a deadbolt lock to "secure" it. I prop a white aluminum door, also barely on the hinges, against this door, but I don't feel safe.
I turn to look at the inside of the house. I don't remember much, except that it looks the same as I remember from being a kid. The difference is, it is bare, almost nothing is left in the house. There is a tan vibe through the house, I don't remember if tan was a prevailing color, but it felt familiar. The wall to my left as I am looking in is flimsy particle board with a gray, faux wood pattern. The gray, upright piano may have still been there.
I turn to my right and see a wooden community center table covered with junk. The house has a huge (HUGE) bay window. More than half of the front of the living room. This window couldn't open IRL. There are two, smaller windows one on each side and they would slide up 6 inches or so to open (I don't remember if they were there IRL). All three windows were open and I couldn't close them. There was no screen to keep bugs out.
Somehow I see that it is 80 degrees inside and I am reminded of another time I was here (in a dream where the heater was running constantly to counter the open windows) where my brother and oldest sister were living in this house and it was in similar disrepair. Neither of them are here now.
On the community center table in front of the window is a mass amount of garbage. There is a long piece of cardboard that looks like it is supposed to fit under the open window and I try to wedge it there. If the heater is running, I should make sure I am not wasting energy. After this, I look again at the table and notice how much mold and crap (figuratively) is on the tables. Toys, papers. Garbage. Three pizza boxes with left over slices covered in mold.
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