Such Dreams May Come

Evening walk at Seapoint/Salthill again, down onto the damp beach, Lola drinking in all the sniffs. I noticed this lad from the road, sitting beside this graffiti, and when he turned around I asked him if he minded. He said no, not at all, but got up after a few minutes of my clicking away.

Dream last night: on the phone to one of my dead friends, Anthony, itself a rare enough event. In the way that you can know things in dreams, I knew that he was in hospital. We were talking and he cut our conversation short to ask me a question: it might have been "Do you know what day this is?" but I'm not sure. In any case, it threw me and I was immediately feeling terribly guilty that I hadn't acknowledged something. His birthday? Or was it that I hadn't acknowledged the fact that he was in a hospital bed (though this would have been relatively normal in his last years)? The connection went (or he hung up) and I couldn't manage to get through again. I think by this stage I was wandering, at a loss and perhaps actually lost, through a strange city that might have been London or might not: crowds surging past me, a sense of being somehow stranded and untethered, anxious to put something right, some lost or missed connection, some word or phrase out of place.