Two Frets

I hear some people talking in the hallway outside my apartment door. I peer through the keyhole and see a woman, maybe 30, talking with the neighbors. She has something in her hand, it looks like a petition. Suddenly my apartment door is open and I’m in the hallway. The neighbors are not signing. She looks at me, I say sure, but I want to know what is it first. She shows me. It’s a birthday card for someone in the complex. I say, sure, I’ll sign it. She hands it to me and then she tells me that I need to give it to the next person to sign. And then she’s gone. I have the birthday card back in my apartment and I’m fretting what to do with it. I really don’t want to go find someone else in the complex and ask them to sign. Not exactly don’t want to. Afraid too. Getting the signature weighs on me. Yet I feel obligated to complete the task. I settle on taking it down to the 11th floor and wedging into the door jam of another apartment, maybe with a note. Then I worry what if they see me, what excuse would I have for being on the 11th floor. So I decide to try the 11th floor of another building.
This plan and potential consequences weigh on me long after I wake up. The next day is my birthday.

Sometime before that, I on a trip to the US and I stay at my parents house. I sleep on the sofa. My brother Pat is there from Houston. Trepidation then sits in. My parents house has already been sold. The new owners could stop by any time and catch us. I wake up worried about this and it takes some time to shake. I think to myself at least “the force” which used to appear in my recurring 704 nightmares was no longer there. But I still can’t shake the worry that the new owners will discover I’m been sleeping in 704. And then I remember the pictures of 704 gutted. There is no sofa to sleep on. It’s just a shell. The dream fades like the exhaust of a 747.