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“Do you like sunflowers?” Bushia asked one summer afternoon while I was visiting her home in Grand Rapids. She was holding an envelope containing the seeds, presenting them like Jack’s magic beans. A long-forgotten childhood memory was triggered, as I traveled back in time to the magical backyard I had shared with my brother Joe.
“Yes, actually I do. Joe and I used to watch them grow in the garden every summer when we were little,” I replied to my Grandmother.
“We loved watching how tall they grew and were always bewildered when we stood next to them. They towered over us like Jack’s beanstalk to another world. We never understood how they could grow so high, like they were stretching and reaching for the sun.”
As I reminisced about the happy experiences Joe and I shared in the backyard the memory of Fabio from Florence entered. I became lost in thought remembering our conversation while clubbing in London the previous year. He had expressed to me if he were a flower he “would be a sunflower because they stretch and reach for the light of the sun so they can continue to grow and grow.”
My mind oscillated between the magical backyard from childhood and Fabio in the London club. It felt as if a message was being delivered to my healing heart, but I was
not home. Bushia brought me back to the present as she gently grabbed my hand with hers and gave me the envelope.
“Well, the church handed these out at Mass today. Take them if you like.”
“Thank you, I’d love to,” I said while putting the seeds in my pocket and kissing her on the cheek before I left. The next morning I returned to my landscape job I had begun in the spring a few months after returning from Europe.
It had been approximately six months since I had risen from my ashes in London. Afterward I lived in Amsterdam for a few weeks where I met an Angel who lovingly greeted me into a new world. It was a world I was not ready to embrace so I returned, weakened but safe, to a frigid Michigan January. My previous employers, the Notos, welcomed me back to the restaurant with a job waiting tables. I did not share with my family how dire things had become while in London. I feared their reactions and did not want them to worry. I felt the worst was behind me. While traveling like a gypsy for three years, I defibrillated my soul with constant stimulation of new lands as I processed Joe’s death, both inside my mind and outside throughout the globe.
Slowly I learned new perspectives of how to live with and accept losing him. The worst of the battle with the demons and darkness felt oceans away. My use of drugs and having sex with men to cope, escape, and release pent-up emotions had served their purpose and could be retired. During my time as a student interning in London and for the weeks in Amsterdam afterward, while exploring my sexuality, I had created an alternate identity named Michael. Overflowing with shame after every sexual experience with a man, brought on by a conservative Catholic upbringing, it gave some comfort and ease to disappear into another person and tell my male paramours that my name was Michael. As I morphed back into the straight, blithe Jason everyone knew for my return to America, I deserted Michael, leaving him and his liaisons lost in Amsterdam as I boarded my flight to America.
Once I began my landscaping job I found it extremely physical, but welcomed it after abusing my body in Europe. It kept me outside in the warmth of the sun, so I could continue to heal. Each day, putting my hands in the earth, helping life to grow, gave me purpose.
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The Reverie Bubble
Non-Fiction'The Reverie Bubble' is the follow-up to 'Amsterdam Angel'. It is the second book in a series of four. Feeling confined by his conservative and religious Mid-western upbringing, closeted Jason, who has created a career of being a globe-trotting gyp...
