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Spirit Guide

Return to Xanadu

It’s not always the ghosts of Christmases past that follow us.

John Ege

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Do you ever find this life journey so tedious that you would like it to just be done? I have visited that thought a lot. I take it back to about age 6. There were quiet moments, too, for sure. I would stare up at the ceiling from a bed, studying the landscape pretending it was the moon. I would map out territories, mountains and valleys. Did they use glitter on ceilings back then? There were little pin pricks of light scattered across this alien land and I would dream of going there. Were these the lights of spirit guides reminding me I wasn’t alone?

Xanadu — Suddenly

1980, Xanadu. It’s one of my own. I acknowledge the script wasn’t so hot, and it didn’t do well. The music was everything. The magic of it all. I am not sure my folks like it, and I remember mom laughing at the man who roller skated at full speed into a mural of muses on a brick wall. She didn’t see the abstract. She read the book Illusions because I recommended it, and she didn’t get that either.

Perhaps it was a ghost in the background. The muse. Music and muses helped me persist in a land I found too hard to navigate most of the time. Xanadu echoed a story I had been telling myself earlier, invisible friends. It became a story I retold in adulthood, and only in my…

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