First, some domestic scene-setting: Tony had plastic surgery to resemble キムタク and I was serving oranges that grew increasingly unlike ones I’d pick at the grocer, the last so much larger and hideous it had to be a saggy grapefruit. A cabbage in the fridge had a purple streak in the center that also indicated its past-best state. Then I was part of an outdoor procession returning home from a protest gathering and a young woman walking beside me looked dejected, so I took hold of her hand, which seemed to pick up her spirits. This platonic gesture caught the eye of my boyfriend, former co-worker Fred (to whom I apologize, my field isn’t what it used to be), whom I pointed out and neither of them was pleased. When we reached the tall carved double doors of the place I shared with him, I bid farewell to her and she turned my way with a Ruth Wilson smile under her hood, which all but sealed my fate with my current relationship. We retreated to our indoor pool with a third man, who joined us in a game where I threw a football at a target at the other end, but my partner remained distant. The living room hid the water under a retracting floor like the one at the host’s in The Party, and as well as we were doing, I knew it was time to divvy it all up.
Cursory keyword search tells me I may not have mentioned it yet, though dreams like this happen often enough that my recollections of them ought to convey the real emotional or intellectual impact from such self-inflicted scenarios. (I shall never forget one where I met 할머니 years after her passing and was overcome with sorrow that we didn’t have more time together, feeling it even after I woke.) But jealousy is for more passionate, primitive minds—I recall a recent opportunity to experience it when the wife took a younger lover, which left me nonplussed—and my simulation only produced resentment, a reminder of immature wardens.
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