Beyond Cloudia

A fictional memoir of a boy born with the knowledge that 'it can be different.'
GG is the protagonist, also known as Galaxy Galacus. He dreams prodigiously, dwells beyond Cloudia and ventures through earthly life tossed between fantality and reality. Fantality is that which lies beyond reality, it is an extension, a world only limited by our imagination.
Before finding his true I-am-ness his experiences are varied, dramatic and tumultuous. Barely escaping a deadly virus as a toddler he loses someone very close. For the first eight years he is raised by his grand parents, living in a self-built rock and timber cottage bordering a forest high on a hill in central Bavaria. They are surrounded by nature and beauty and blissfully at peace without television or computer. From this seclusion he is torn away to a life vastly different in South Africa. A childhood of grave unhappiness unfolds followed by intensely rebellious teenage years and ending up in a boys' boarding school. Branded schizophrenic, stupid, mentally ill and a hopeless dreamer this teenager tries to assert himself. He finds early love and loses it. He meditates and practices Yoga and philosophizes; he rides horses bareback, walks barefoot through winter, shovels sand and climbs mountains.
Suddenly he finds himself back in Germany working a job, commuting with soulless beings in the tube and ending up in jail for a night and then in a psychiatric ward. Disillusioned with Europe he scrapes every penny together and heads back to South Africa. He immediately buys an old Land Rover, and his love for Africa, especially the Okavango, flares into a lifelong addiction. One desperate day he emerges as a reborn Christian thinking he had found 'the secret', but alas, it did not work out. Nature calls him ever deeper into the African bush. A big dream goes bust. He succumbs to drugs and befriends Al Cohol. Questions of purpose swirl around endlessly in his mind. Why? Where to from here? How? When… and why again? Unrelentingly he slips into the shadow land of his soul. No friends, no love, – a senseless existence. More drugs are consumed and in a bizarre turn of events he escapes into the abstract world of Assembler language coding. Darkness swallows him.
It all changes and GG awakens to a life of abundance, joy and purpose; flying aeroplanes and finding love and magic locations and marvelosome events. Zambia's Lusenga Plains, Mozambique's Quirimba Archipelago. Amazingly successful friends; a beautiful woman; his own island; flourishing creativity; music, guitars, stories, writing, – the superlative life he always knew could be unfolding.
One day he returns from fantality and changes his life radically. It had become a mindless rut. He quits a lucrative job disillusioned to the bone and searches for that elusive gift he believed was within. But nothing happens, instead life gets worse and the belt has to be tightened further and then he crashes his aeroplane in a far off place in Mozambique and becomes a muttering recluse lost in searching thought. When it all becomes too much and nothing seems to work out anymore he goes into the mountains alone for weeks on end, to find that thread in life again. He batters his brain to find a way forward that would make sense to him. Fear and worry take control and he battles with the nemesis. A fatal relationship mistake with terrible episodes, accusations and abuse pull him down even further. His soul screams from loneliness and hurting. Life balances on an abyss and thoughts hurdle down forbidden and unspeakable paths. And then, as the pain of forlornness reaches its peak, – as was predicted in the beginning, that ‘it can be different,’ – the storm subsided. Peace returned to the exhausted being. There was purpose again and love too, and life had finally taught its last painful lesson and the time for happiness and joy and fun, in abundance, began.