Here you are

I am in a foreign country, in a foreign bed, on a foreign Internet connection. People speak English in one billion different incarnations. It's chilly. There are widely used coin dollars (or, rather, pounds). I imagine I'm Hemingway or Henry Miller or a more feminist presence than either (J.K Rowling, maybe, scrawling on napkins), typing away in cafes and drinking wine before noon. It is everything I imagined it would be, in one sense. I am alone a lot. My friend has fallen in love. I'm here for a week but I think time stretches when you're alone and traveling; there is something elastic and infinite about crafting a day around one or two "sights to see" or adventures to take, lifted from carefully concealed cheesy guidebooks. I like being invisible. I also don't like it. I have pretended, in my mind, that I have come here with any of ten different people; imagined this trip like people in love would do it. Or people with money. People with different life-priorities.
My favorite place so far is this tree in St. James Park, where Liz and I fell asleep for two hours eating chocolates and smoking and not saying very much together. I feel old, for some reason, though over all this is a pretty youthful thing to spend time doing. I wonder, were I to go back today, if the shadow of that old oak could cover me and my ten imaginary friends. It probably shouldn't have to.
I really do like wandering! This is already starting to sound like I'm trying to replicate Henry Miller (who I'm reading, go figure) and/or Carrie Bradshaw at the end of the Sex And the City series when she whines back home to her friends that Big needs to save her. This is time carved out in space to and for myself, I think. I'm taking it like a challenge, or a brace of strong and slightly acidic medicine. I'm going to start writing something here.
It does make you think, though, watching people you love find connections in unlikely ways. People really in love, if you're ever lucky enough to really watch it happening to someone, take on this QUALITY. It's like they always look safe, and they're sustained by this glow. For some reason, since it's been a long time since I remember feeling that way, I can't always trace it in people's faces. I can't imagine how they can still look that way after days and weeks and years pass, how time won't ebb at their patience or kill their desire. But if I've learned anything this summer it's that time doesn't work that way (which makes me think of The Flaming Lips and Bonnaroo, tralalalala). People change all the time, and in this way, everything is static.
I also had this thought walking home this morning about how MUCH it takes to build a city -- and not just in terms of architecture or history. Cities are drenched in these personalities, personalities being composite of absolutely everything -- demographics, public transportation, languages, advertisements, street markings, famous foods. They are really like living, breathing organisms with thoughts and assertions and favorites. This makes it easy to judge them. Or, judge yourself against them. Here you are. By comparison.