Summer portal fantasies
A little escape can help us see reality better
A seashore is a boundary not only between land and sea, but between the world we know and another one holding many mysteries. Magical things can happen in such a place.
It helps to be away from our normal preoccupations, but any place or moment can open a door into a different world.
I often go to my roof in the evening with a glass of wine to relax and stare at the sky. For a pleasant hour I stop worrying about the destruction of my country and let my mind wander. Half-forgotten memories can well up. Sometimes I just listen to the cheers rising from a nearby soccer field.
Time is not linear in our minds. A friend who died 32 years ago feels as present to me as if he were sitting across from me chatting over drinks as we did long ago. Though I have grown old as he did not, his spirit lifts me and reminds me of our shared devotion to causes greater than ourselves.
Imagining alternate timelines reminds us that individual choices can change things, for good or ill.
The other day I found an email saying I had won millions in a sweepstakes. I am wary of scams and did not follow the link. Nonetheless, I felt its gravitational pull. Millions of dollars would be nice. My favorite director sitting next to me on a plane would be nice. Mad tyrants disappearing through wormholes would be nice.
"A wormhole," according to Wikipedia, "is a hypothetical structure that connects disparate points in spacetime." In literary terms, a wormhole is like the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland or the twister in The Wizard of Oz. It's a magical portal between worlds.
The nice thing about a wormhole, at least a fictional one, is that you can go through it, have a lovely adventure, and get back in time for breakfast.
I do not want our mad tyrant to get back. I want the portal to vanish behind him, as with the Bermuda Triangle, where you fly into it and are never heard from again.
Sometimes I feel that I fell asleep when Joe Biden was president, and woke up in a dystopian novel with a deranged dictator tearing the country apart.
Some people insist they're not political. If they can sustain that fantasy, they're lucky. For many of us, just walking out our front door and expecting to be treated like an equal human being is a political act.
Still, I understand. We don't always want to deal with politics. We just want to go about our business. I bet the people being grabbed in the street by masked ICE police and carted off to internment camps would also like to go about their business.
Occasionally a nation goes to sleep and demons work their mischief. Our best prospect may be for the demons to devour one another, which they are beginning to do.
Social media can be a wormhole into a dark place. I broke away from the platform formerly known as Twitter a year ago after Elon Musk turned it into a spigot of disinformation. At some point, I may try another platform. For now, I need my time staring at the sky.
Sometimes, though, I choose a restaurant instead of my roof to benefit from the skills of a mixologist. At my local Thai restaurant I like to order a Flaming Typhoon, which consists of rum and tropical juices with a little lemon rind boat on top filled with rum the bartender lights on fire. I almost hate blowing out the flame and drinking it. It would be disrespectful to the mixologist, however, to sit there entranced without tasting her handiwork.
Anything exquisite, like a meal or a work of art, can transport us. If I ordered enough Flaming Typhoons, who knows what magical realm they would carry me off to.
But as much as we need escape, it is important to keep our underlying grip on reality. Just because a fictional character can fly or walk on water does not mean we should try it ourselves.
I need a few hours or perhaps weeks of peace, not eternal peace. That will come soon enough. While I am here I am eager to embrace life, including by marrying the man I love. That is a promise I intend to keep here in this imperfect world, before someone else tries to reduce me to a bit character in his own warped fantasy.
Richard Rosendall is a writer and activist who can be reached at [email protected]. Copyright © 2025 by Richard J. Rosendall. All rights reserved.