My Castle on a Cloud
Today I had planned to write about Wonderland. Wonderland and Alice and “white rabbit white rabbit” and smoke and how the real world is full of rabbit holes and smoke that is not superstitious. Maybe I’ll flesh that thought out tomorrow, maybe in a week, or maybe never. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all, because everything is different now.
Today was a turning point, in a big way. It began with an automatically focused freeze frame of a steaming cup of molten java. Automatic graduated to manual and steam graduated to smoke, and the fragrant lotus smoke formed a cloud beneath me, lifting me high, high, HIGER.
In my elated state and with a newfound vantage point, I spotted it; pristinely preserved in undeveloped film, yet real enough to touch. I bowed down to ancient dusty walls and columns that enabled me to walk through history—through Shanthi Eliot and a surname-less Phyllis and a seven-to-nine year old girl who achieved eternal life through ink. As I floated down corridor after corridor after mouse maze, the significance of what I had just stumbled upon awoke me like a whole barrel of smelling salts. I had found something I wasn’t even looking for—my castle on a cloud.
A crown of flowers adorning my head, I began to collapse into the arms of my castle. I was no longer walking through history. I was dancing through the future. I twirled through graduations and travels and marriages and new beginnings and deaths and birthdays that I wanted to see for the first time in a long time. I danced through time and condensation and it was beautiful.
The best part is, I have a snapshot to prove it.
Someday soon I will revisit my castle-home. I’ll light my incense and grab a hold of the cloud it creates and let the wafts of smoke carry me back home. It will be beautiful…
…and everything will be different.
“I know a place where no one’s lost,
I know a place where no one cries,
Crying at all is not allowed,
Not in my castle on a cloud.”
