Somewhere halfway across the globe, there is a girl - let's call her M - who for a period of time dwelled deep inside my heart. And, because life being life, and things like distance and other complicated matters being what they are, it all really amounted to not much more than a collection of conversations on the telephone, maybe some emails swapped, and suchlike. But as I think of her I'm struck about how much I can really recall now about her - I guess I still have the image of her etched in my imagination, and perhaps echoes of her voice may yet flicker flleetingly in the wind - yet, for all that everything else seems uncertain in my mind. Even where she comes from I can't quite for sure determine whether or not I misremember. I am, though, choosing not to err on the side of caution and think that she does come from the city of which I shall be writing, because this impossible version of the city of Coimbra is a fairly new addition to my menagerie of vast urban sprawls.
I include M here because not only am I of a mind that this is where she comes from in real life, but because I recently had a dream where I was in Coimbra looking for her. I know not why, what drove me to go there, but in the dream I found myself in the city trying to figure out where I could find her. If memory serves me right, I was not alone in this quest of mine, there were maybe two or three other companions alongside me. I can vaguely recall that these might have been people culled from my waking world, though none with whom I've had much contact these past few years. In this pursuit of mine, I had nothing to go on but the vague information that M either had or managed or worked at a bar somewhere, but quite where I did not know.
As with so many cities, this one had an older part of the town and a more modern side as well. Bear in mind that in no way, shape or form does the city I dreamt of mirror the real one, no one part of its dream aspect correlates to the waking city. So, on I go on the pursuance of a dream M, whom I never met (even in dreams I know this) and do not really know how she looks like. Maybe I have a plan, maybe I don't. Maybe I go from bar to bar asking people if they know of her. Now, at this I'm leery of my memory, because I can't remember in which order I went from one side of the city to the other. But maybe because I have the memory of the old town still firmly in me, let's begin there.
It's old, but not in a real-life old kind of way. What do I mean by this? It's certainly medieval, but medieval in a north-european kind of way, if north europe had been in the south of europe. What I mean is that it was located on the shore, and huge docks sprawled for miles on end, long boats swaying gentlly in the river waters as they lay moored. There are wooden buildings, tall, very tall and very wide - these would be mainly for food stores as well as assorted shops that dealt with commerce, and mongery and smithery too. I feel I had arrived here by boat, though that voyage is nothing I'd dreamt of. As I walk through these tall, wooden structures, I see that not very far from where I am there seems to be some raucous noise coming from some other buildings just up a sloping path. Feeling that this would be as good a place as any other to start my inquiries, I make my own way there.
Yet when I get there sufficient time had elapsed that by then everything had closed. Was it that much farther than I'd imagined? And it was either very late or very early in the morning, depending on which way you choose to look at it. As the last people vacated the - apparently - only actual bar, I asked them if they knew of M, and one of the girls there gave me a mysterious sort of answer, noncommittal as if to provide some form of plausible deniability, which left me thinking if whether or not this girl was M herself. But not feeling confident enough, I made no move or reply, and the group left. And so did I make my exit, pondering the crafty wording of what the girl said, trying to decide if she'd told me some secret I needed to decrypt or not.
With this, the dream moves to the newer, modern, almost futuristic part of the city, and what elapsed between moving twist these locations I cannot guess, but I'd given up on finding M, for whatever reason. Where I stood now was an immense plaza with a titanic building right at the center of it, and this was a building seemingly made of the shiniest glass, supported by trusses and girders that had a sheen of their own as well, and it commanded the surrounding the plaza as if the greatest diamond in creation had been placed there by some cosmic giant's hand. What mighty kings or what unfathomable wealths might dwell there? In my mind I saw this building as having such a noble purpose that I could have never imagine this to be the bus terminal. And, bringing a common and re-ocurring theme from these kind of dreams, I yearned to go home, I yearned it ardently. If indeed I did or not, I cannot say now.
The city of Coimbra is not one of which I have pleasant memories of, in all honesty I can say I do not like it, nor do I think I ever shall. I see no beauty or interest in it, and in the multiple times I've been there I could not come to get what makes it and its people tick. It's just not for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment