IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Me and my immediate family go to the beach, to a hotel not quite on the water, but with the entrance on a road perpendicular to it. We get there and we go inside of the hotel, to the 13th floor, except somebody misread so it’s not the 13th floor, it’s the 5.36th floor. We go into the wrong room, and settle down for about 5 minutes before somebody remembers we’re not supposed to be here. We get all of our stuff and leave the hotel, and go a couple budding down the road closer to the water before we get to ours. Alls well that end well, right? Well, a couple days in, the forecasts call for a pretty bad storm, but nobody’s worried about it all that much. The skies get covered with dark rainclouds, the air chills and waves start picking up in intensity. I see this from our room and I’m interested, so I go down and see the coolness firsthand. It’s like ok I guess. But as I’m walking back, the wave sounds cease and screaming begins. I look back and a massive, 100 foot wave grows closer and closer by the second, already almost to the shore. I run as fast as possible, passing people getting out of their cars due to traffic and stuff, and other, less interesting people also running for their lives. I realize I overshot the hotel, so I turn back. The wave got so much closer it’s insane. And just as the full force of it is about to hit me, somebody grabs me and pulls me into a building. It’s a woman in a Holiday Inn vest, along with a bunch of her other coworkers. Some are holding another employee there, who looks injured. I meekly ask “is he ok?” and then shut up. I go upstairs to the 13th floor, except this is the wrong hotel and I misread the number 5.36 as 13. Once I get to the top, the elevator does not stop, it opens its doors and bounces up and down. I need to jump off at the right time, which I do. I walk down the hall into the room I think is ours (which happens to be the exact same room my family was in when we accidentally went to the wrong hotel. Inside, there are people living there. A small baby, an elderly woman, a 40 year old woman, and a small brown/tan dog. Oh, and they were all Asian but only spoke Spanish. I understand very little of what they’re saying, so once they’re done with their conversation, I say “perdon, cuando eres tu-“ and I’m cut off. Now, in my mind I was trying to ask her where her front door was, but I said out so poorly she thought I was saying something else. She goes off on some support of rant in Spanglish so my brain could partially understand, but most of it was lost. She shows me where the door is, and I get ready to leave. But there’s another obstacle: what shoes were I wearing? I look down and see a pile of every type of shoe I own and use - and more. However, each has a tell, for instance I know it couldn’t be my sneakers, because I’m not wearing socks. My pink slides are too small and seem to be bitten by the dog a bunch, and it’s not the Nike ones because I don’t wear those all too often. However, I put the pink ones on first so I could be respectful and also take them to the pile, as I had found them away from everything else. Eventually, I deduce which ones I must have come with. I rush out of there, wanting to see if my family’s ok from the tsunami, so I go to our actual hotel room. Yeah everyone’s fine. I go to sleep and wake up the next day. I go get my stuff and put on the pink shoes. Wait, the pink shoes… I realize I completely forgot to take the shoes that were actually mine. I consider going back there and trading them, but the elevator scares me, and either way, there’s no grantee they’re still there. As a matter of fact, I had a hunch they had left shortly after I did from their room.
