I know I’ve written about this before, I just don’t know
where to find it exactly. When we stayed
at the hotel on Samos, the main level had a
bar with a large walk-through opening that led to a balcony that overlooked the
ocean. I sat and looked out through that
passage and thought it to be magical; transformative. Almost like the Looking Glass portal or some
such thing. I imagined taking a run at
it and launching myself up and over the balcony and into the air, never to
return to the ground. I would take
flight and find my way over and through the various realms until I was reunited
with my ultimate love.
The seeds of this vision were planted by my reading of
Jitterbug Perfume, where Alobar exists in a parallel universe for hundreds of
years, waiting to be reunited with his long lost love. I had visions of another character coming
into existence after my taking flight. I
would separate from my body and give birth to another man’s psychosis. This wild man of Samos
would be a community vagrant, shifting around the town, surviving off the fat
of the land. The wild man of Samos would be a legend, just like the wild cat.
I would be somehow connected to both of these characters—the
wild man and the soul that took flight.
I existed in metaphors with this thinking, having left my body behind at
the balcony and becoming an ideal that would eventually make its way back
home. And the wild man would appear
about town, not making a ruckus but being a presence enough that people would
notice and wonder who he was and what his story was.
The wild man would be a lost soul, in search of the true
love he had lost at the resort. This
vision tied into the vision at the water’s edge, where a royal beauty decided
to walk into the water and just keep going, along the floor of the ocean, under
the sea. Did the wild man lose his one
and only true love while on vacation?
Did he lose her to the ocean?
There was a vision of a hotel room, where there was a
stained bedspread. The stain looked as
though it could have been blood; it was
unclear what had happened there. But the
wild man knows, and he is haunted by it.
He had been given a rose by his love, and the rose had been smashed
into the bedspread by the suitcase that was hurriedly thrown onto the bed and
packed with the belongings of both him and her.
He had paused to notice the stain, and fretted the demise of the gifted
rose, rubbed painfully into the bedspread like a melting crayon.
The wild man would wander the town in the coming years,
searching for his lost love, saying light poems to her, drinking and bathing in
the fountains at the town square. He
felt that he would always love her. He
would return to the room at the hotel once a year, on the anniversary of her
loss, and revisit the moments in his mind, staring into a red stain on the bed.
The wild man, it turns out, was who I might become if I were
to stay and live out my life in the small resort town in Samos. The woman that I would have lost would have
been my wife, as she was adamant on returning to our life back in the United States. There were no other options. Either I said goodbye to her and stayed to
live my lonely life as a wandering vagrant in this exotic locale, or I had to
go back and face my suspended reality back home. Or I could take flight and leave my body
behind, separate my soul and entity energy from the physical being by running
out the opening and jumping off the balcony.
While floating over the ground below, my soul and body would separate,
and though my body would eventually have to deal with the reality of the harsh
concrete below, my soul would be released, featherlike, to the wind.
My body would fall to the earth and crumple, but I would be
floating, soaring. And I would and could
go anywhere that I wished to go.
So the vision wasn’t explicitly a suicidal one; it felt like
I would be choosing life, eternity, happiness, magic. There wasn’t a place in the thinking for
things such as death.
