Return to Oz

The Adelaide botanical gardens are a gateway into faerie. I came back here because it is the space where I broke and made my life, all alone, 16 years ago. I wasn't sure what I would find, probably nothing. The significance of this kind of place tends to move when you go away from it for a while, and like always when chasing dreams, the map is fuzzy and unreliable.

Just inside the gate in the deep shade of a fig tree, an old woman was in gentle tears, perhaps seeking its lifegiving comfort. Her voice was matter of fact, a notebook open in front of her. She was relaying the details of someone's coma, their next step treatment, the spectre of death nowhere in her words or tone but everywhere in her face.

Follies and fake Greek statuary littered the path as I went further in, like a stage set signifying opulence. I saw a tall cigar pine, the last clue of a childhood scavenger hunt, so went that way. It led me to a missing link pine, one known through its fossils but then discovered to still be alive in 1994. I was alive.

I found my way to civilization and my innards pulled against it. Circled the water lilies with their fable of the girl who fell in love with the moon and trying to get closer to him fell in a lake and drowned. The moon took pity on her and turned her into the Amazonian water lily, who only blooms at night when her lover gazes on her.  (The moon is drowning while I sleep.)

I circled the Appolonian aisle, all Japanese river fountains, feng shui, hedges, and then the Dionysian aisle, an arbor of wisteria. A child screamed, barbaric and raw. The birds screamed, dulcent and free.

A tunnel of pine boughs led me underneath a troll bridge. I felt a thrill of fear. I was careful that I let no branches touch me but as I crawled under another bridge, and then another I began to wonder if I was on a path at all.

I climbed out before the cliff. Back almost civilized people picnicking, I don't know where I'm going but I can feel so strongly where I should not be.  Then lorikeets played in a formal fountain, Versailles in paradise.

I can see a glass palace in front of me. Is this where I am going? It seems too large, too grand. When are things bigger than you imagined them? I thought it always went the other way.

And yet, and yet there is something familiar about these sealed shut panes of glass. The fronds and vines that press hungrily against the barrier, reaching for me. The giant grotto, shaped like the large fireplace in the witch's house, shaped like my heart, at one end.

Both doors were open. I held the threshold, held back by an invisible force. Do I want to go in, after all? Do I want to give it up, all those years of wanting? Will that be some kind of end to it all? But then again haven't I already walked through these doors? Didn't it already happen, in dreams? I held my breath, and stepped inside.