the universal peace monument they built on the bombsite where the university church was
Dream: I was in a parallel world, where pubs were open for breakfast, and Oxford had been bombed in the war. The centre of town was different; the pub where I had met my sister for breakfast (we were doing some form of complex civic duty that day, something like but not exactly jury service or sitting on an assessment panel) was one of Oxford's rambling snug-filled cosy alleyway pubs, but not one I knew, as if the suppression of pub in one location had lead to its reassertion in another. The news was on in the pub. There was some form of trouble, warning. We went for a walk to let breakfast settle and kill half an hour, and headed into Radcliffe square, where what had been the University Church (flattened in the war) had been replaced by the massive stepped universal peace monument. We went up onto the monument, like you do. As I rounded the corner of the monument for the fantastic view up and down the High Street I saw a smallish tank coming towards us, from Carfax, and behind it a much, much bigger tank. It was tearing up the road, damaging the sewers. There was a thinning of other traffic, fewer people. I pulled out my phone to find out what was going on and turned back to find my sister who had wandered off around the monument. For a scary moment, I couldn't find her, and then I heard her call back to me from the other side of the monument. She had descended into the square, and was heading off towards our work/duty, and I tried to call her back to see the tanks (and maybe some part of me thought we would be safe on the monument, or that what we were doing that day wasn't so important in the current context, or just that I wanted to be with her). "I really don't think I can wait any longer," she said, and turned away, and the alarm went, and I woke up.
The funny thing is, it wasn't until this moment when she turned away that I realised this wasn't my world. The way she dressed and wore her hair, even her body shape; it was her, but not my iteration of her. This one had taken a different path.
cleanskies) wrote, 