When All Thought Lost

I booked a room I could hardly afford at Ravenwood Castle. Rapunzel's Tower. Each room has a theme. This is the highest room, up two flights of stairs, and I wonder if there will be a long braid of hair hanging from the window or on a bedside table. Maybe a hairbrush or some sort of fancy barette. It was bill week so money wasn't plenty, but I could afford the room and dinner and drinks for the weekend. I was never a penny-pincher. But it was the cheapest room.  

I wanted the Shakespeare Suite, but it was booked. I had to get the room. I felt an inexplicable compulsion to do so. I cannot write at home. My mother's TV is too loud to concentrate. We bought the house together years ago. Neither of us with anyone, or going to be in the foreseeable future. It was a prudent decision. I paraded women in for a while, but parades run their course and there was never anything more than instinct about it. It was purely animal and I believe it distressed my mother. I could have moved my desk into my bedroom, rather than in the hallway, but I'm not practical in that sense and when I get a bur, I get a bur. I had to write. In silence. I felt an overwhelming desire to rewrite the end of "Romeo and Juliet," as though Shakespeare himself possessed my soul in order to do so, displeased from his afterlife view of how the story ends. 

I felt the same. I love Shakespeare, and I love a good tragedy, but it was not a good ending and a good ending is paramount in any worthwhile love story, real or imagined. It was terrible and inelegant and has bothered me as a writer ever since I first read then watched it. How the actors have managed to fake that hokey death scene in high school gyms and auditoriums, and in films, and on stages, grand and small alike, all across the world for the better part of four centuries, I will never know. I got a good alternative ending in mind. The radio was bleating the same terrible songs and bad news. Wildfires. Riots. Chaos. I switched it off, getting close to the castle. It is all gone. In a flick. It doesn't exist. I'll write as the world burns. I reminded my mom to lock the door. 

The castle is enchanting. I've been numerous times and once briefly worked part-time serving dinner and cleaning rooms and chopping wood. I settled in my room and set my laptop out on the desk and lied in bed and stared at the nothingness of the ceiling. The void of stucco where there existed ideas of all sorts. I must have been there for about ten minutes or so, slowly blinking when the thoughts came, that cataleptic awakening of the creative life in me that usually hides. That has to be coaxed with a drink, or meditation, or silence to come out. It was a kaleidoscope of thoughts. Snippets of everything I knew of Romeo and Juliet. I must have had a half-smile on my face. Everything streamed so clearly and there wasn't a sound to distract me. 

Olivia Hussey starred in the finest production of the play I have ever seen, Franco Zeferelli's 1968 film. I watched it for the first time in Mr. Bagby's Honors Lit. at Stanbery Freshman Highschool in 1992. It was his way of rewarding us for reading it. Maybe I was so enamoured because I was the same age with much the same youthful desires, angst and spry feelings in me that I didn't quite yet understand. The purest ecstacy of feeling is with an altered-consciousness. To not understand fully that which you feel. To have no rationale. But I was enamoured and she was that drug. What Bengal Fire she lit in me that still burns. 

It was then that I started to write poems and dream my dreams of feeling that way, as I did when I looked at Juliet who looked at me. Only she didn't look at me, she looked at Romeo, or rather, the camera. But for a moment there was no Romeo. There was no camera or Zeferelli directing. There was only she and I from the classroom TV to my chair. Across heads of nobody  and pools of drool on my desk that could have been lakes. I understood it then. I was in love with Juliet. Romeo was but an impediment. Four centuries were but a few hours and some days. Words were breath. And pixels on a TV were flesh and blood. We all don't get to drink poison or put a dagger in our guts for the one we love, but committed no less we ought to be or we shouldn't be at all. Love is not love without passion. It's stagnancy. It's as to be marooned. I think I was lost in that movie for at least a year. I read and reread that play repeatedly, certain scenes more than others, hoping the ending would change. 

I sat down and wrote, several hours passed. I was saving Juliet's life from Shakespeare's faux pas. His irrational parapraxis or rare literary miscue. Label it how you will, but I was fixing it. How I dreamt of meeting someone I felt this way for. How I wish I could write myself into the story. To replace Romeo, that dolt. But I was no longer 15 and there was no conceivable story I could create where I could go back, or she could age further. And it was not me that she loved so, selflessly, I circumvented his death as well. She drank the sleeping potion Friar Lawrence gave her to fake death and avoid marrying Paris. But Paris kills Friar Lawrence who he accuses of aiding the girl's suicide. So she is buried as though dead, the secret of the sleeping potion with her, but then comes to life hopelessly in the grave, until Romeo, in disbelief that she is dead, retrieves her body from the grave so to kiss her one last time, discovering that she was prematurely buried by the condition of the casket and...deceased...once more? No! To awaken when all thought lost! To have kissed the breath of life into her.

When All Thought Lost, perhaps, retitled. I decided to finish after dinner and a few drinks. I saved the story, then went to the castle pub which is down a flight of stairs in the basement where the room, The Duke's Dungeon, is as well. The castle is a romantic getaway destination. You see couples of all ages from all over the country, so seeing someone single is akin to spotting a bald eagle. But it was then that I saw her. Sitting by herself. Drinking a glass of wine and reading a book whose title, try as I may, I couldn't make out. I sat at a table next to hers and, besides for the bartender who said she'd be right with me, we were the only two in the pub, bar the stuffed raven. I ordered a beer to start, then I looked up and smiled at her, and she smiled back at me. She put her book down, drank some more and appeared to begin to say something when the restroom door opened and a man came out. The breath left me. The unspeakable, insufferable breath that Juliet must have felt in the grave I gave her to spare her from death, I felt in plain air. The husband, I presumed. Her Romeo. "Well, maybe they're swingers," Rodney Dangerfield in the cerebral cortex of the unusual comedy club for a mind I am cursed with, cracked. He goes on for hours.

But the man walked past the lady and up the stairs to the exit and it was again just the two of us, just like it had been in freshmen highschool across nobody heads from the pixels of a Zenith TV to the lake of drool that was my desk where I drowned in bottomless hope. It was her in a living body. Grown. My age. Beautiful. Drinking wine. Appearing as alone as me. Perhaps, I pleased Bill Shakespeare by rewriting the end of his play. So maybe he asked God for a favor, for surely someone of his stature could arrange such a thing. 

She asked me if I was in Rapunzel's and I said yes. And she smiled and said she was in Shakespeare's, and I laughed to myself. She spoke in a humble yet luxurious way. She smiled and laughed a lot and everything about her was wonderfully contagious. I tried not to stare, but it was as though I were watching a movie or something so uniquely beautiful that I didn't want to look away for fear she might vanish as suddenly as she had appeared. Even Rodney was quiet. When all thought lost, there she appeared as though she was always was. 

I bought her a drink and she bought me one. We had dinner and watched the snow fall in the night out the patio door and windows where empty tables and chairs sat beneath blankets of white. No other world existed. She said she was here on a whim. Divorced recently. Kids were away. And she always wanted to come. When I told her my story, she gave me that astonished look. That mesmeric and surreal look which said to me that one of our two rooms was unnecessary. I tried not to get ahead of myself, but it felt like we both had waited four centuries to be in this particular moment. We would have drinks and laughs sitting by the pub hearth, just the two of us, the pine logs crackled, popped and sizzled all the while until it was to be decided which room it would be for the night. 

Love is patient, Romeo. Love is patient.