In Continuum.

Spanish Castle Magic



It's very far away,
It takes about half a day,
To get there,
If we travel by my dragonfly

I grew up with the blue mechanical cat called Doraemon and possibly the laziest cartoon character that ever stepped foot in the world of comics, Nobita. I remember bugging my mother at bookstores to get the Doraemon comic books because I loved all the little gadgets that he'd pull out from his chest pocket. The way he solves all of Nobita's problems - willingly or unwillingly - with those futuristic and almost alien gadgets. Anything from the time machine hidden in Nobita's desk drawer, to the Dokodemo door which allows the user to get to anywhere just by opening a door, to the Take-copter that allows the users to fly.

Nobita reminded myself of myself, simply because I wasn't all that great in school either. I never scored a zero for my papers that's for sure, but I spent the bulk of the time studying, daydreaming about the life that could have been. My attention drifted from the pages of my books to the dusty windows in my bedroom, then to the cars traveling along the streets like matchboxes with wheels. In the skies, the clouds like cotton candies, like a dozen plaster of Paris, molded into strange shapes. A disfigured dog here, a bundle of bananas there. In the skies with the clouds, there were infinite possibilities for my seamless imaginations.

No, it's not in Spain,
But all the same,
You know, it's a groovy name
And the wind's just right.

At that moment, I wished for my desk drawer to slide open and to have Doraemon pop out from within, to give me his cloud hardening gas, just so that we could fly up into the clouds and build our own Kingdom of Clouds, like the time he did with Nobita and his friends. That'd be nice, wouldn't it? That'd be nice. But the bottom of the drawer always feels the same, the same hard wood with the same books and papers piled up on top of one another. The ball of dust in the corners of the drawers, no time machine waiting for me inside, no worm hole for me to crawl through into a different time. But in the pages of the comic books my mind wandered, dreaming of giant green fields and myself in the middle. Like the life of a shepherd, sitting under a great big tree watching over his herd of sheep, waiting for the sun to cross the sky on a lazy weekday afternoon.

I have often dreamed about doing that someday, to find a big green field and lie down in the middle as the clouds go by. I did that once when I was much younger, but I was at the beach and the sun was just about to set then. My family was at the East Coast restaurants, the ones that lined the coast, selling mainly seafood and other local dishes. Our relatives came for a visit back then when we were still new to Singapore, and my family decided to bring everybody there for a night out under the stars, with the salty smell of the sea in our noses. But the food interested me little and the crowd was suffocating. So I excused myself from the table and took a walk to the edge of the ocean and sat there until the stars started to appear and the clouds drifted towards the horizon where the wind was blowing to. The oil tankers and small fishing boats in the distance, against the towering clouds above made everything look so small, so tiny, so trivial.

Hang on, my darling,
Hang on, if you want to go
You know, it's a really groovy place
And it's just a little bit of Spanish Castle Magic.

I remained there for the most part of the night, feeling the cool breeze and observing the clouds. I wanted to dive into the cozy arms of the clouds, especially the one that looked like a friendly old man. Or maybe the ones that looked like scattered pieces of torn tissue. I thought a giant bird must have died somewhere in the arms of the clouds, for the clouds in the upper reaches of the skies looked like feathers, the ones you get when you tear open your pillow. There were the mountains, and then the mountains beyond those, lining the skies like a canyon of sorts, always changing with the strength of the wind blowing hard and blowing soft.

It was a couple of months after my grandfather's death - the first death in my life. My mother never truly explained the idea of death to me until moments after the yellow veils around my grandfather's coffin was lifted, and I was allowed inside to pay my last respect. I remember the scene well, the way the lights from the outside filtered through the yellow fabric, and casted a warm light on my grandfather's peaceful face. In life, my grandfather was the kind of man who never showed much compassion to people, and was incredibly strict to his children. My mother told me about the flood that struck hard when she was a child, and the way my grandfather commanded the whole family to lift up the car just so that he could put stools underneath the wheels to prevent the water from spoiling the upholstery inside. He was that sort of father to my mother, the kind who had very warped priorities in life. But still, he was a very capable man. And the death of my grandfather was like a hammer stroke upon the hearts of the family members.

The clouds are really low,
And they overflow,
With cotton candy
And battle grounds red and brown.

But in death, the frowns faded in between my grandfather's eyebrows. The fierce look on his faces was gone, replaced by that of a deep sleep. He looked as if he was asleep I remember, but his skin felt cold against the tip of my right index finger. I tried to open his eyelids, but my mother pulled my hand away before I managed to do it. But of course, at that time, I hardly knew much about death, or the reason why my mother was crying so hard as she folded paper flowers to be burnt in the furnace later. Death to me back then, was merely the massacre of say, an army of ants in the side walk or the body of a broken pigeon. It never occurred to me then, that death applied to humans too, and grandfather wasn't just sleeping, but dead.

A fortune-teller has been a long-time friend of my mother's family, and he supposedly had spiritual communion with the underworld - like I said, supposedly. He told my mother that my grandfather is in Heaven, that he has a high pose in the kingdom up there as some kind of personal secretary to God. I found that to be utterly ridiculous and far-fetched. But to see the comfort in my mother's eyes when she was being told of that, it was good to say that somewhere in the Kingdom of Clouds, grandfather has found a nice comfortable place to live in - even if the Kingdom of Clouds exists only in the imaginations of my mother.

But it's all in your mind,
Don't think your time,
On bad things,
Just float your little mind around.

So by the sea that day, I dreamed about visiting my grandfather, the man I never got to know. It's strange, to say that the mental image I have of him is the black and white picture of him at the funeral, and the one I mentioned above with him lying in the coffin. I don't remember his smiles, his angers, or even the feel of his palm on my head. I wanted to ask him what he thought of me then, and what it was like in the clouds, to fall asleep everyday to the brilliant display of sunlight in the West. As far-fetched as the idea of having Doraemon crawl out of my desk's drawers, at least this dream wasn't so far away. I only had to look into the towering clouds and imagine a ladder leading up to the edge of one, with my grandfather at the very end of it. It's a dream that I never told my mother, but I'd like to meet my grandfather and talk to him, to have him tell me stories of the past. It'd be nice, to know someone so familiar and yet, so distant, all over again.

But the light in the mornings are always too glaring, and the sun always too scorching. My feet are always planted to the ground, and my body always too heavy. It just seems like everything is against my will when it comes to reaching for the clouds.

So I take pictures of the clouds at my balcony, and then trace the edges of the fluffy pillows with the tip of my finger on the computer screen. That is the closest that I can get to those natural marvels in the skies. At least it takes me that much closer amidst the clouds, the white mountains. Even if the battery in my camera runs out, all I have to do is to sit on the wooden bench at my balcony and daydream for an hour or so. Because with a bit of imagination and a bit of foolishness, you never know where your mind can take you - even if it is a place further than the eyes could see.