Paradise This Way

Inviting Clarity
photo by bfranco.

I took my plane out to the island, my mind still reeling with the towering obelisks of New York, now soothed by the sight of the patch of land drifting on the blue sea; mists pooled at the base of Mount Waukashabi, and my hut lay there somewhere beneath the jungle fronds. Pedro would be getting my bath ready, placing slices of fruit on a banana leaf, and mixing my margarita. How long had it been since I had been out to the island? Seven months? Not since Frieda had left me, not since my daughter had disappeared somewhere in California to break into acting, most likely destined for porno.

But it was a different world now, especially since the merger and my buyout. This plane that once chauffeured me to meetings across the country now served only to transport me from one side of paradise to the other. I had always thought paradise would be across the sea somewhere, or on a mountain peak above the clouds; now that this dream had become reality I realized that paradise is scattered throughout our daily lives, in our own neighborhood; perhaps in the arms of a lover, in a bite of dark chocolate, sip of rare wine, the sun rising on a deserted city street. My island was not paradise; it merely provided safe harbor from the pain of loss, the failures of those things which had not been able to float on the sea.

But don’t think of those things. Drive those thoughts from your head or you will disturb the pale blue of the sky and water. The sea now glints innocently in the sun, but its anger lies just beneath the surface, sudden squalls ready to rise up at the least provocation. Sea birds snatched from the sky and plummet to watery depths, whale carcasses bloated and swaying on the sea floor. When rescue rafts are tossed by hail and lightning bolts, when black clouds mix with blacker seas, and trees bob up and down from islands battered in gales, then the human soul screams out to a deaf sky. Cold water lulls the mind to disorientation, to desert abysses, to mother tucking you in at night, to a pale light just beyond the horizon, growing closer, and the dull moan of wind and death fills your ears, drowning out the childhood songs, the nursery rhymes, Dr. Seuss creatures waving from an island. You turn and roll in waves, uncertain if you breathe in air and drown in water or breathe in water and drown in air; reefs cut your thighs, you taste blood mixed with saltwater, but of course your body should be inherently mixed with the sea, it is only right that your body mingles with this greater and crueler body of water. Then you taste sand, and the foreign weight of land, the unrelenting force of earth pressed against your face, and the sea reluctantly releases you, recedes, calls forlornly from across the flats, and you finally submerge into the deeper sea of unconsciousness.