London Dreams

The day before yesterday I dreamed I was in the West End- I have this friend here who always wants to travel and for some reason I dreamed she and I had gone there- we were wandering around the West End (which looked less like itself and more like a futuristic shopping mall) and I ran into another friend of mine. We all decided to get dinner and then after that to walk to Oxford Circus to Beard Papa and get cream puffs.

Somewhere on the way I noticed things weren't right- there was supposed to be a bookstore somewhere and it wasn't there and that jarred me out of the dream before we'd made it anywhere near Oxford Circus.

I spent two and a half months living in Italy and I've never dreamed about it. I spent six weeks in England- mostly in London- and I almost can't believe how much I miss it. I miss the Tube. I miss my Oyster Card. A few weeks ago there was some site doing a bookstore review and the place was somewhere in Soho and I kept thinking I must have walked past the store at some point and never noticed it. I keep thinking the Chinese food I had in Brighton was the best I've ever had- even though I know it's a lie.

Ugh.

I picked up Andrew Grant's Even the other day- it's this pretty badass spy novel- that I first found out about on the Tube. They do these massive posters on the walls there about this week's book and David Trevalyon- the spy in the book- gets his life stolen and he's going to get... Even. Pretty Jason Bourne-ish. Turns out there's a sequel out now for it. Picked it up for my Kindle.

And back to the morose stuff. I saw this guy at work the other day- just one of the customers milling about- a doppleganger for Andy. It took my breath away. To some extent things like that make me angry. That there's only so many bone structures or hair and eye combinations amongst all of us. Other times I see something like that and, I mean, of course it's not him reincarnated- the time is all wrong for that, this guy was like, 20 or something- but it's spooky. It made me think of all the things we don't wind up doing or saying. I used to work at this pizza parlor and we'd get free pizzas all the time and I used to take them over to his apartment. I always thought how uncool it would be to tell him how much it meant that he let me in and I never said anything. I kept meaning to make him a pair of gloves and never settled on a pattern and every time I start to think about having cold hands in the winter and making myself just one more pair I remember I never made him any.