The Land of the Dead is Disneyland

By: LC

I think this is a dream. Yes, it has to be. Last time I was here, there were tears and anger so red the roses bowed their heads in shame. Tomorrowland did not give me a hope for the future, but rather a hope to make a change and escape such a metallic, broken world. Death was lurking, filling our related souls with black and we didn’t even know it. Every breath was a moment closer, closer to when I’d lose you and I wouldn’t be able to whistle that song with you ever again. No more warm nights with firefly rings, holes in heaven, and peach juice soaking my hands as I take another sweet bite. This eternity, this wonderful everlasting moment was never meant to last. People grow old and they die. There is no escape.

I was in denial. My heart was pounding and wishing Tinkerbell could reverse time, keeping your wrinkled tan skin and your pepper colored hair within my line of sight. I always thought you’d be there, like the sun that constantly burns my skin. I thought your presence was reliable—the steady waves that crash onto speckled sand. That day in Disneyland showed me how the wheel is constantly turning, stopping for no one, pausing means being passed up. In this world, the real world, the massive romantic Ferris wheel in California Adventure doesn’t stop at the top. It’s up to us to find and see the beauty that’s always facing towards us, because it’s always turning and this is our only chance.

When everyone has the same sickness, no one will realize it…1My head hurts, my stomach aches, the fever creeps up my spine and I’m searching for a cure, a way out, somehow trying to wake up from this dream, this disease everyone has, a blindness to mortality even when it’s laughing in our face, sneaking up around us when we least expect it and it’s in the stones, the trees, the cold steel structures and the warm golden sun. WAKE UP WAKE UP BEFORE IT KILLS YOU—GRAB HOLD OF MICKEY’S HAND before you realize he is nothing and the cure cannot be found…

I was frustrated, upset, the beauty had been stolen from my eyes and the flowers were tossed aside, pressed into a thousand crushed, ugly pieces, lost in a stale breeze that takes me nowhere. We left Disneyland and two months later you were dead. Unexpected, as usual, the cold truth sneaking up on the unsuspecting bystander as fast as your heart ruptured and stopped. The bright red twenty dollar balloon from the friendly Disneyland sales clerk that I begged my mother for filled with too much air and it…burst.

Funny how it rained that day in Disneyland. You’d think the happiest place on earth would only accept sunshine and smiles. At first it was light, a mere drizzle of chilling drops that gently fell, making quiet pitter-patters while they rolled off the carefully groomed, copyrighted Disneyland shrubbery, soaking deep into the ground, nourishing the overwatered plants and killing them. Then the clouds erupted, allowing thousands upon thousands of water droplets to pour down. With every impact, a shroud of mist would shoot up until the ground seemed to disappear within a gray mass. Is that what happened to your soul? Did it disappear into a gray mass, or did it follow strands of gold?

It was that stupid witch. Or God? Sheol? A skeleton cloaked in black? He/She/It held out the poisoned apple, its healthy red skin a façade of life, another trick that the shadow has cast over our foolish eyes. Take one bite of the red delicious and it’s all done. Did you bite the apple? Is that what brought on the gray mass, the soul stealing away in the dark of night? Or was it a choice, a decision to let go of a mortal life and return to where you came from? Everything is gone and the world has stopped and everything is black.

PITCH BLACK. I always thought pitch black was scary—I can never see anything coming and my imagination lets loose and suddenly a knife is waiting for me around the corner. You always reassured me when I was scared, when the sun went down and shadows lurked around corners. Your large hand would hold mine, wrapping the fear of a child in security as we strolled through the dark yard towards the front porch to watch cars stream by, possibly slowing down for a passing wave. During our last trip, I held your frail old-man-hands with my young-lady-hands and we reassured each other as our boat glided through murky water, cannonballs exploding around us while Johnny Depp fought against his own mortality. I think when you’re back again, this time as a butterfly, you’ll let yourself be tossed in the wind, you’ll enjoy the warmth while it is here and maybe you’ll land on my arm just to make the corners of my mouth crease upwards and to scare away the darkness I feel.

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel, but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends. We pierce doors and windows to make a house and it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends. Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the usefulness of what is not.

I’m not dead, right? So then that means I’m alive. You’re dead but I am alive. That’s a pretty useful thing to know. I keep forgetting you’re gone. I keep thinking I can pick up the phone, I hear the buzzing dial tone and with the quick press of round bubble buttons, I imagine your scratchy morning voice will pick up and tell me it’s all been a joke. The casket was actually empty, rocks weighing down, pushing me further into the grass, its blades bringing forth crimson gems of life, proving the difference between you and I. Cold and warm. Movement and stillness. I’ve been moving but everything around me has been still.

I’ve looked, I’ve lost and now I’ve found love and I wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for the truth of death. Your spirit was gone before your body even hit the tiled floor, moving fast enough to allow you the avoidance of that pain. Months later our Disneyland trip almost became my last too. Your plastic, powder-glazed body was settled in the earth by the time I was laid in a hospital bed, remembering all the moments in which you donned the oversized gown and needles and tubes while I fumbled with words. No movie or music can provide escape for a physical pain so profound. It’s all very hazy. Youthful movement caused heart to burst, but not quite as completely as yours. Breath quickened in an attempt to catch up in a futile race against seconds already past. You didn’t have to struggle to reach me—I could feel your will to live escaping the underground and joining my soul. I had the biggest blood stain on my gown and I wore it around proudly. Treatments. A cold from the inside out, so cutting my body could not even shudder. Then it was over. Quell the fear of a return because that’s no way to live. And now I’m a thousand times older than all my peers…

But Pap, there was this sweet boy who called me every night and he wants to take me to Disneyland!

Maybe I’m not as old as I thought?

You died Pap…

And then I came close enough to the abyss to see your silhouette turn around the corner.

I did not follow.

You taught me better than that.

And now I’m back in Disneyland again. It’s been seven months since I’ve visited this place, five months since I saw your gray whiskered face, felt your leathery skin and heard your laugh. This place reeks of your death, of sepia toned photographs, stale popcorn, tears forced into hiding. With the passage of moments and the mixture of happily ever afters, even when someone is gone, things are beginning to change. This is the happiest place on earth but death is required here. It watches from the dark corners, it rises from the stagnant waters and lurks behind those doors with handles that won’t budge. Not every door needs to be opened and that’s okay. Not everyone needs to be around to be here.

I am finding that I like the usefulness in nothing, in open spaces, in windows and sunsets and warm, soft hands that hold my own. Life continues and this place is full of death but also life. The two cannot be separated. And I’m here with someone else now, hands as smooth as mine, but big and strong and steadying my own. The nothing in his arms means I can fit in them perfectly. It must be a sign—he echoes your own words:

“The prettiest girl in the world.”

I always want to laugh and say the world must then be a small place. But your scold is echoed there too. As we now walk along, there is comfort and a silent happiness in our unspoken words. Understanding. Have I found an understanding of this ebb and flow of time, of breaths stolen away in the night?

Empty your mind of all thoughts. Let your heart be at peace. Watch the turmoil of beings, but contemplate their return. Each separate being in the universe returns to the common source. Returning to the source is serenity. If you don't realize the source, you stumble in confusion and sorrow. When you realize where you come from, you naturally become tolerant, disinterested, amused, kind hearted as a grandmother, dignified as a king. Immersed in the wonder, you can deal with whatever life brings you, and when death comes, you are ready.

I’m tolerant, amused, I think I understand now, my heart is softened like my grandmother’s, who has finally been rejoined with her lover. I will be as dignified as a king when my own time comes and kneel to help in whatever way I can when those I know fall. You see, the small baby is soon to grow up, the childhood magic to disappear because we get old and there is no stopping that, last time I was here you were old and now you are gone, gone forever but still surviving inside me, a memory never forgotten. Life is changing with every possible second, every turn and moment, each defining and continuing lives yet also bringing us closer to the abyss. One moment we breathe a wonderful breath, the next it is our last. Blood is splattered on popcorn and foot long churros. There is no predication, no solution. Even when you try to package it into 120 minute movies and sugarcoat it with cotton candy, the truth is that Goofy is smiling, strolling Main Street, and before you know it, he’s the abandoned skeleton on the beach that you snap a photo of when riding Pirates of the Caribbean. In the time it takes for God to change one second to another, we’re gone and it’s only the beginning of a new tale.

And we never seem to understand anything, do we? We think we have a grasp on what happens around us, on how life works, but soon things are lost to chaos and the Tower of Terror won’t stop dropping us down, making our hearts lurch and our stomachs fill our throats with choking vomit. The wisdom we gain is quick to fade so hold on, hold on fast and steady and try to make it out alive. Disneyland took away everything I loved, but now it’s filling with a peace, a kind of contentment I didn’t know I’d be able to find and I’m seeing that really nothing can take away what you love. Maybe Mickey did teach me something in those two hour time slots and the cheesy music that they don’t shut off at night. If I die in this very second, I’ll have no regrets, I’ll have known that my life was lived full of love and happiness and that I didn’t hold back, I reached out my hands to the sun and took in its warmth and if it burned my skin it was beautiful and I knew at that second I am alive, skin burned with a permanent moment of happiness. I’m reaching for love and it’s something I think I can hold and it’s okay if it happens to slip through my fingers because I’ll have known that I fought my hardest, I tried my best and love can be found if we only look.

There is death in this place, in this happiest place on earth, and it’s essential because without death we wouldn’t know happiness. Snow White bit the poison apple and fell into an endless sleep but it wasn’t eternal, she was brought back into this world and woken up with a kiss of true love from her prince. Is that what your death was trying to teach me Pap? That love lasts even after you’re gone? It returns in other forms. This place doesn’t seem to haunt me anymore, with the changes of time and someone newly found.

*

There is wonder to be had in the dark corners and my grandfather’s spirit is the light of the fireworks… Guiding our way.

The crowd pushes us but Pap taught me to stretch out my arm so you can follow and if our grasp must be released I’ll kiss you over and over again, covering your face and your precious sweet eyelids with this moment everlasting.

1 Italics from the Tao De Jing

9