By: Daryke Cassar
Inspired by the artist Salvador Dali
When you go to bed at night, what is the last thing you think of? Do you ponder your wishes and your worries or do you simply try to free your mind of all that is good and all that is bad, before falling into your nightly slumber? There once was a boy who wished, who hoped, and who prayed that one day he would be able to see his mother again. He worshipped her like a goddess. She was his light and the one and only person that encouraged the boy to always keep his imagination alive.
Every night before bed, the boy meditates. With every muscle and vertebrae in his whole entire body, he sits tall, stiff, and still just like a tree. He starts by counting his breath, clearing his conscience. Breathing in through his nose and breathing out through his mouth, he starts to peel away at the roots of his mind, his body and his soul. The boy starts by imagining that all of the skin on his body is removed. Then he goes on by stripping off all of his muscles, piece by piece, like you would do with the outer layer of an orange. Next, he pictures all of his inner organs falling out, one at a time. All that remains is his bruised and battered heart, his boney skeleton and his thick, colorful, geniusly psychotic and extremely eccentric brain. Once he reaches this point, he will officially start to enter the gateway of his own mind.
A skinny little man with crooked teeth and an awkward smile pops out of the boy’s heart. With his long, boney fingers and toes, he starts to climb up and up and up each vertebrae of the boy’s spine. As he reaches the brain stem, the man slaps it… hard. A bolt of purple lightning strikes out sucking the man into a black hole. Vortexing down, the man passes images, thoughts and emotion at speed. When he reaches the bottom, he finally and slowly passes all of his morals, reasoning and judgment before officially entering the lands of his own mind. The boy navigates as his own soul, a soul that is stuck in a labyrinth of memories and in a place where time and reality does not exist.
The boy finds himself sitting criss-crossed in the middle of a hot, desolate desert. Tan, sandy grounds covered by a big blue cloudy sky surround him. The boy is lost and perplexed with fuzziness. [1] As he rubs his eyes, his blurry vision becomes clear. In the distance lies a massive sandstone wall. With a smooth face and jagged rocky sides, it stands well over two hundred feet tall. The boy walks up to the wall enamored. A carving is placed at the top right corner reading, “WELCOME to the Kingdom of Butterflies.” He notices two butterflies dive down towards him, but doesn’t care. His mission is to find his mother, not to make friends. His long, thin legs stride forward, as the butterflies fly to both of his sides.
“Excuse me, excuse me, excussseeeeee meeeee boy! Do not leave yet! We are the Guards of the Kingdom,” hissed the two in unison.
“I am looking for my mother. She is my light and without her I feel lost and black with depression. I need to find her. My heart aches with pain and longing for just the sight of her. Do you know her?” the boy mutters with darkness in his eyes. He smiles as the butterflies look at each other and start to twitch with joy.
“We have been expecting you,” the blue butterfly grimly giggles. It pulls a small, crusty scroll out of its pocket and hands it to the boy. “The journey is long, but if you believe then you will find her. She lives where The Land, The Ocean, and The Heavens meet.”
The sand starts to become patched with feathery white snow and pointed emerald grass. It starts to look as if the snow had ever so slightly formed a white silhouette around each blade. The farther the boy walks, the thicker the snow gets. Soon he is trudging in powder towards a town of small stone towers, each with big spinning butterflies that look like windmills. Each butterfly has its own distinctive pattern and color. Each spins with its own unique speed and rhythm. One butterfly would flap a wing here and flutter a bit there to keep spinning with the wind. The energy, a high hum with a peaceful resonance.
Stalking a wounded butterfly, next to one of the towers, is a light cream colored ocelot covered in spots of all different sizes. It creeps in the camouflage of the tall snowy grass. Low and slow, the kitty crawls with a remarkable sense of subtlety as it approaches the butterfly. Step by step he inches closer and closer. The silence spirally chills the air as the cat reaches the back of the orange butterfly. With one of his small sharp fingernails, the cat tap, tap, taps on the butterfly’s shoulder. Surprised and appalled the butterfly turns around and bitch slaps the cat in the face.
As the cat bolts away in an angry blindness, he barges into the boy. WHAM! They both roll through the snow like an oversized and out of control snowball. They gain as much speed as a barrel after being shoved down a hill. When they reach a point where they can stop, the cat winks and gets up.
“Hello… I am Babou,” the cat proclaims in a deep, elongated Spanish accent. “I am so sorry you had to witness the weakness that took over my mind…” The cat pauses day dreaming, “Butterflies just taste so… good!” he winks again. The boy stares at the cat in disbelief as it continues to speak. “I know who you are and I am here to help you find your mom. The guards gave you the scroll I requested, right?”
The boy reaches deep into his pocket and pulls out the crusty, old and rolled piece of paper. Babou snatches it with his pesky little paws and quickly opens it. Then with a flash of his teeth, he takes off skipping to an upbeat rhythm. Following him is a puffy trail of dust that gets larger with each and every step.
“Hurry! The boat is leaving soon,” yells Babou, already feet ahead of him.
The boy takes off after Babou. A black volcanic mountain appears in front of them. The cat leaps into the smallest sliver of a crack and disappears. The boy blinks not one or two, but three times in disbelief. Shocked, he keeps running. At just the right moment, he jumps. Images of his younger self, springing off of a diving board during a hot Spanish summer, flash holograms around him. Then he dives deep into the vertical pool of sharp rock. Landing on the other side, he slides on his stomach, to a dusty, screeching halt.
Babou impatiently sits on a rock, right next to the boy. With one leg crossed over the other, Babou sarcastically pretends to check his invisible watch. They start to run again. Reaching top speed, they weave through narrow passages and around sharp corners. Finally, a light begins to shine bright through the opening of the rock above them. Babou pushes his curved sharp claws out of his paws and starts to climb. He sinks each nail in, one at a time and effortlessly ascends up the face of the rock. Adrenaline pumps through the boy’s veins, as his shaky hands and feet cling. He dinosaurs up to a hole in the rock and his hand sticks. He begins to climb, taking into account each meticulous movement, making his way up the wall. As both human hand and kitty paw reach the top, they sigh in a great relief.
The smell of salt jolts up into their noses as the two take in the vastness of the watery green-blue tie-dye, that is in front of them. [3] Clouds pillow around them and the wind wisps the hair on top of their heads. Floating buoyantly in the blue is an old brown ship with no sails. Butterflies are drifting gently in the wind around the ship. One swoops down, grabs Babou and the boy, and takes off. Turbulence hits the butterfly as it flies above the boat and it releases them with perfect aim. They land feet first on the hardwood floor, with a t-h-u-m-p!
Like dominos, the butterflies begin to fall out of the sky and land where the sails of the ship are supposed to be. Their wings start to flap forward and back. The smooth subtle breeze has turned into a fast bumpy ride as the ship begins to move. The harder the butterflies flap, the harder the gusts become. Knocking nearly the whole crew onto the ground, Babou pokes the boy to follow him. Carefully, they crawl towards the hole of the ship, rocking and swaying on all fours.
A spiral staircase of thick rotting wood leads the way into the plump, grumbly belly of the ship. Lit candles and melted wax line the railing and drip occasionally onto every other step. Creaking noises, coming from the rocking of the ship, give off a sense of eeriness that sends shivers up the boy’s spine. Vortexing down the steps, the boy becomes dizzier and dizzier, until finally reaching the floor.
Inside, everything is still. Slow and steady, the boat rocks and sways with the ripples of the ocean’s surface. There is a man; twenty times the size of the boy, lying on his side, propped up by one arm. [4] His body pruned and wrinkled from the humidity in the air. His face is covered by long strands of brown and white hair that droop sadly over his eyes and back. He is a grim, scary man sitting in sadness, stuck in the gut of a ship.
“Are you a prisoner?” says the boy, confused as to how the big man got in there.
Ignoring the boy, the man raises one eyebrow and turns to Babou, “Do you have the scroll?” Babou struts up to the man and hands it to him. Withered and old the man continues, “Now boy, if you can climb into my chest, it will take you where you need to go.”
Without hesitation, the boy starts to use the leg hair of the man to pull himself up onto his body. It is as if thousands of thick ropes were there for the boy to use as leverage. The man lifts his arm up and shoots a memory of the boy onto the side of the ship. The image is a black silhouette of the boy’s mother. Everything in the background is visible, except for her. The boy is mesmerized by the image… by HER image. He is distracted trying to remember how her skin glowed in the overcast weather of Spain that morning. He reminisces on the smell of her perfume as she walked by each shop, leaving a trail of her behind. In a paralyzed wonder of what the man had done, the boy had forgotten his task at hand.
“Keep climbing!” yelled Babou as he throws one of the lit candles at the boy’s head. “It’s a trick!” he whispered.
The old man starts to laugh. Everything in the world is fizzling away. The boy scrambles as pieces of the man start to fall apart like a jigsaw puzzle. Chunks of the man’s body roll down like boulders, the boy barely jumping out of the way. The man’s skin becomes boogery as it starts to melt into the ground and stick to the boy. Staring up at the man’s chest of drawers, the boy runs. As he climbs up the man’s arm, the flesh rips off into the hands of the boy. With every step, the man’s skin ribbons beneath the boy’s feet. Thinking solely about his mother, he leaps. The boy’s arms and legs are flailing in fear as he realizes he has missed; Babou, climbing just below the boy, jumps, pushing him into a drawer.
Throwing out his hand, he grabs onto a splinter of the wooden drawer. Staring down into darkness, the boy could see the universe. He lets go. His body floats, gliding into a wonderland of little lights. Some red, some yellow, and some blue, he swims in a sea of stars. Visions of orbs spin around him as the dark night sky turns to day. Dusk fades to dawn as the sky changes from black to blue. The orbs spin faster and an ocean develops beneath the boy’s body. Stuck somewhere the boy is not meant to be, he sees her. Colors take hold of the orbs resembling the face of his mother. He sits speechless as they float face to face.
“My darling,” Her brown eyes open and lock with his. “How much I have missed you, my sweet, sweet boy…”
A tear rolls down his face and his chin quivers, “I thought I would never see you again.”
“I am always with you… you have my heart and my soul. Live with the intention of loving every moment of your life… It goes by faster than you will ever imagine,” Her soft gentle voice lingers in the air and the boy awakes.
He sweats with her voice still echoing in his mind. He looks down. His hands are wrinkled and withered with age. He is holding a paintbrush in one hand and a mirror in the other. Salvador Dali stares back at himself and sees the ancient, old man gazing back. Winking he says, “The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.”
Time melts away all of the sadness that he has ever felt. Every night, he searches his soul to create more memories with his long lost mother. Every night, finding her.
