wasn’t someone I wanted to collide with. It wasn’t only his intense gaze that told me that.

His stories of brawls he got into where he sounded like an invincible juggernaut, shrugging off what would put others in his situation inside of an ambulance immediately, and also being capable of returning the damage just as capably, gave me an equally if not greater determination not to give him a reason to see me as a threat to himself or his relationship.

It wasn’t as difficult as one might imagine, though. The three of us would sometimes watch TV together at their place, and Travis, though he was a stocky tank of a human being, also had a great sense of humor, and he would keep us entertained for hours and laughing constantly. I believe he respected me as a friend, as I did him, because he never questioned my presence at his home, though his unchanging facial expression sometimes made it hard to understand exactly what he was thinking and feeling under the surface.

Travis wasn’t much of a party goer or nightclub enthusiast, so he never went out with us. He seemed to trust me to take care of Gina while we were out, knowing how I regarded her and whatever it was he saw in my character for himself. Both of us did however know how wild Gina could get at times, with both her words AND actions. She could be like a pit bull, the one in the group that everyone gathered around and gave attention to while returning the appreciation and affection, and at other times, ready to tear a person’s flesh from their bones. She wasn’t the biggest or most intimidating person by appearance, but she had the energy of five people when she was angry, and holding anything back was absolutely out of the question for her at those times.

One evening, Gina, a couple of her new friends I had recently met, and I gathered at the Cardinal Bar to listen to some music and relax on the weekend. Everything seemed ordinary, until one of our old East High School classmates walked in the front door and started shaking everyone’s hands enthusiastically and with authority.

“It’s Justice. He just got back from Iraq,” Gina said.

Time froze for me in that instant as I stared in horror at Justice, not because of anything he did at the moment, but because of a sudden realization about a dream I had about four years earlier.

I didn’t know Justice well at all. I had a single class with him junior year in which we never spoke to each other, and towards the end of senior year, the both of us were part of a small group of people left over at my friend’s house party that had just been raided by the police. He told everyone to close the blinds, turn off the lights, and just wait it out. His plan worked.

At least a hundred of our schoolmates fled the scene, and there were hundreds of stories being told about it at school the next day and all around the city. Because my history with Justice was limited to a single and brief interaction in a time of crisis, it was odd to me that he would appear in a dream of mine about a year after graduation. In this dream, I saw at least a dozen rows of army recruits facing forwards. I sensed they were going to be involved in a major conflict of some kind, the war of all wars that I had experienced until now. At the front of one of the rows, there was a single individual whose face was clear enough for me to recognize. Justice was that person, standing there looking stoically at a point beyond where I was standing. This was about four years before the Iraq War began and two years before 9/11 occurred, and I had no knowledge of Justice’s desire to join the military.

“How could it be a coincidence?” I thought to myself while feeling completely bewildered by the realization.

In my dream, he joined the military and was sent to war. In reality, he joined the military, and was sent to war. I was certain there was a meaning behind it, but I couldn’t comprehend it, and it had nothing to do with the alcohol in my system. It seemed almost as though there was some larger chain of events spanning across the years, like a timeline where both the politically significant and the personally subjective merged and filled in the missing pieces with each other, similar to the relationship between free will and destiny. It also highlighted the relationship between the dream world and the physical realm.

As I had previously mentioned, I had crossed that boundary before in a very personal way with my romantic interests Lisa and Kathy, but this was the first time I had ever observed a tie to larger events from that side. Around the same time, I had a dream about Iran launching a missile barrage against a foreign state, seeing the missiles come down like shooting stars at night and feeling the fear of anticipation of their impact. Based on Iran’s known missile capability, I assumed that the target site was somewhere in Israel, but the answer to that dream had not yet come. I knew there was much more to these dreams, and wondered what other kinds of messages I was receiving that had such significance, and what I might receive in the future.

In mid-July, Gina had her birthday celebration. She invited all the usual suspects, and the plan was to first go to The Nitty Gritty to get her birthday mug, and then head over to Club Amazon on University Avenue. I nicknamed that particular section of the street “Ambulance Row” because every time I would pass by there at night, there would be an ambulance on the side of the road picking someone up. It became so regular that I would say to myself, “Time to see an ambulance,” and then see it with my own eyes a minute later.

We assembled at Gina and Travis’ house off of Thompson Drive. I knew everyone who was present except for one of Gina’s new friends named Clarissa. Her best friend Emily was also there, who I had known since high school, but there was now a silent tension between us unlike anytime previously. Recently, she and I had started something, but it ended rather quickly. There were warning signs about her that I refused to listen to, including the first time I ever saw her in a photo back in high school and received a very strong first impression of her that I couldn’t quite summarize in words at the time. By this point in time, I had a much better understanding of what that first impression was. I learned that she was a temptress who had no loyalty to anyone except herself and her own desires. After things already started between us, she gave me subtle warnings that I ignored because I thought somehow it wouldn’t pertain to me. I arrogantly assumed I was different in her eyes, but she ended up trying to play me just as she had probably done to others. When I could no longer deny the person who she had always shown me to be, the decision to get out of the situation was immediate and with no regrets, but because of our mutual friendship with Gina, I chose to continue to tolerate her presence.

As we were all in the front of the house preparing to leave, I heard a voice coming from within the garage.

“Andrew Gramling.”

I turned around to see who would possibly be calling me by name to see Juan José López leaning against Travis’ car sipping on a bottle of beer. I was very surprised to see him, although in the future, Juan José had a habit of suddenly appearing in front of me around the city in both expected and unexpected places like a character in a fantasy story. I found out then and there that Travis and Juan were old friends, and they must have decided to hang out while the rest of us went out.

At The Nitty Gritty, Gina, her friend Clarissa, and I were standing in a small group talking to each other while the others were sitting in another location. I had decided to remain sober, because I had an instinct that being sober on a night like this was called for. While we were conversing with each other, I noticed someone walk in who I hadn’t seen for a couple of years with a small entourage surrounding her. It was Kathy from the old Anime Club that I was a regular to. When she noticed me, she looked me up and down surprisingly and with wide eyes. Since I left Florida, I decided to take fitness more seriously because I had realized just how many people out there were interested in targeting me for a reason I still had not figured out yet. I knew now that I had many enemies, some of them being very powerful. I assumed my new physique was the reason why she looked so surprised, because I was rather thin the last time I had seen her.

I never fully understood how Kathy regarded me. We started hanging out outside of Anime Club shortly after first meeting, she told my best friend at the time about how attractive I was, then told me she was subconsciously talking about him when I confronted her about it, and subsequently revealed herself to be an emotional vampire who seemed to use me to make herself feel better whenever she was feeling down, while I would feel miserable afterwards. I tried a couple of times to end our friendship, but always felt guilty afterwards, so I continued to be her emotional sponge by choice because I didn’t know how to set up a proper boundary between us.

After speaking to Kathy for a moment, Gina approached me with a look on her face that conveyed distress.

“Andrew, this guy keeps trying to talk to Clarissa and she keeps telling him to leave her alone but he won’t!”

“What??”

I focused my eyes beyond our conversation to the man who was standing in front of Clarissa. He noticed me looking at him at the exact same moment, realized that his game had been exposed to others, and fled the scene quickly.

I’m not sure if it was consciously or unconsciously, but Kathy always seemed to want to make me feel like she had a lot going on and seemed resentful whenever she felt as though I did. In the later days of our friendship, she would mention her boyfriend in a way where it seemed like it wasn’t relevant to the conversation, like she wanted me to feel some kind of way about it. She tried the same thing here tonight, and I realized she hadn’t grown much, and that she thought she was going to run the same old games on me. After going cold-turkey on Emily, I was much more prepared to stomp this one out like a freshly tossed cigarette.