Dear Lana,

I had a dream yesterday. Two of my friends and I were back at my high school graduation, but for some reason we were back in the first floor of my middle school talking in front of my 7th grade locker. I was trying to open the lock with my combination all those years ago — 35-28-9 — but then I realized they changed up the combination. One of my friends asked me what I wished for. I told her I wished things could’ve turned out the way I wanted them to. She asked to be real since that didn’t work out, so I told her that I wanted to better understand what I wanted.

It had one of those ephemeral qualities to it, as if it was a flashback in a movie to show a formative moment of a character. I could totally believe if that had actually happened in my life. It reminds of that entire sequence where Shirley was asking Kiritsugu what he wanted to be in the future in Fate Zero, which in turn served as a catalyst for the rest of Kiritsugu’s personality following her death. There are so little difference between dreams and memories.

In the next part of my dream, I found myself at the Gherkin in London. It was uncharacteristically cloudy, and the hallways were so barren from any people or things. I was just drifting in this hallway near the blueish gray elevator corridor, not sure what I was looking for. I’ve never been to the Gherkin before, so the interior looked close to the brutalist building I lived in Beijing during my freshman summer. I opened a door and found myself at the same office in my freshman internship. Someone asked me why I was there, and I told them I just wanted to look at the view.

Awhile back, one of my friends once brought up how the study of economics isn’t really about understanding the economics of our current world. It is closer to creating realities with certain sets of assumptions and studying how different the world is. I ended up studying English and economics in college. If you asked me why I studied what I did, I could talk about the parallels between the creation aspect between normative economics and literature. In both of these studies, the goal isn’t to describe the world in its reality but to highlight something about this world by creating another world altogether.

Immediately, after waking up, I searched up who were the tenants of the Gherkin, as if I had some divine calling to work in there. I’ve heard the Gherkin had power to melt cars by redirecting rays from the sun in a specific manner. If that is not divine, then what is?