Of Dreams and Doughnuts

I always have breakfast at the same place. I always order the same: a ham sandwich and a mint tea. Not the weirdest breakfast one can order; once I saw someone having a beer and an ice lolly at 9.00 in the morning. After six months of having exactly the same, the waiter, who has always shown himself to be extremely shy and prudent, told me:

"Last night I dreamt you ordered a cheese sandwich."

He’s in love with me. You don’t have to be very wise to know that. As with most waiters, you get with him the feeling that he’s a waiter by the wonders of determinism, and that he couldn’t be anything else. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t feel the same about him. But that morning I liked the way a complex feeling had shown itself, in his subconscious, in such a small simple way.

"Oh, did you? I’ll have a cheese sandwich then" is all I was able to say. And I immediately regretted it, for it might have offered him the erroneous idea that I’m willing to make his dreams come true. I have never ordered a cheese sandwich again.

But yesterday I ordered a doughnut. It was the nicest glazed doughnut I had seen, or maybe it was just me, sometimes I’m extremely sensitive to the beauty of sugary, rich-in- saturated-fats stuff under any guise. Anyway. The waiter smiled at my order; maybe he interprets these little variations in our repetitive communication pattern as a sort of a progress in our relationship. He provided the doughnut –still that naïve smile on his face- and while he was placing the rest of the orders on the table, he noticed that I was taking a picture of the doughnut. Obviously he couldn’t help but ask “Why are you taking a picture of a doughnut?" –his gullible eyes wide open.

"Because I like it."

"But why don’t you take a picture of your friends?" –and at that point I knew he was overstepping the imaginary line between us because he just didn’t understand why the hell somebody would want a picture of a doughnut.
I had a quick look at my workmates and said “Well, I like the doughnut best”. I had to say these last words with a big smile to avoid hurting anybody’s feelings. He stared at me astonished, he didn’t know what to say or do, let alone what to think or feel about me. “Someone taking a picture of a doughnut: What is that supposed to mean?” That’s what his concerned eyes said, as if he had never thought, nor imagined that life and beauty and doughnuts could be seen in a slightly less conventional way.

I saw pure incomprehension in his eyes. He probably saw a massive distance growing beetween us. And he possibly wondered how come that distance was, inexplicably, bigger than the one between us while he was lying down in bed, next to his wife, and I was in his brain, asking him for a cheese sandwich.
But I don’t think he wondered what, if anything, the doughnut had to teach him about that.