Suddenly the feeling of you leaves

I dreamed there were people living in our apartment—not displacing us, just camping in the living room and the dining room and my office, two or three groups of them, with mattresses and hot plates. They were strangers, but it didn't seem to matter. One of them, a woman about my own age, took to smoking on the back porch, like my grandmother in my childhood before she quit a six-decade habit cold. She had very dark hair loose around her face, thin cheekbones and her skin a paler brown than it should have been, as if she had been sick for a long time; I remember her wearing a black blouse and a red skirt, stark as a character on a stage. "To be bought for sex isn't a shame," she told me. "To be bought for approval is a sin." I don't think we were speaking English. I thought afterward that I might have translated it endorsement, but then again she might have meant exactly the sense she used. It occurs to me now to wonder if they were refugees, but if so, no one talked about it. I don't remember them arriving. Maybe they were my subconscious' comment on local housing prices. It was obviously a dream because people weren't always fighting over who was taking up the bathroom.