I spent most of my life imagining utopia as someplace else. A Galt’s Gulch. A Shangri-La. Fifty-five wilderness acres in the Appalachians I named Kalien, where wounded creatives and I could finally exhale. A cottage on one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. 

But my endless search surprised me. The place was never out there; I had to become it. I think it looks like an ordinary week in Barcelona.

It looks like treating this whole city as my sensual sandbox. The Museum of Prohibited Art. The Erotic Museum on La Rambla. The virtual rooms at the House of Lust and the dreaming stacks of the Library of Tomorrow. Nude beaches with beautiful bodies everywhere, one of my favorite fantasies come true. Topless pools across the street from our terrace where shame forgot to follow me across the ocean.

It looks like playing house and doctor with my friends, grown adults who still remember how to play. Friedrich Nietzsche said that hidden in every adult is a child who wants to play. The child in me likes to play nice and yes, loves to play naughty, and at long last he has been let out to run.

It looks like waking every single day beside my best friend and my lover, the same magnificent woman, her hand finding me before either of us is awake, oh my, what is she doing? The morning sliding from dream into skin with no seam between them.

It looks like reading great books and writing them. Following a question down a rabbit hole with no deadline waiting at the bottom. A day of reading without guilt. And if a passage arouses me, letting the pleasure of an orgasm heighten the experience.

It looks like long meals with curious, open-minded people from around the world, la sobremesa, the lingering conversation that outlasts the food, the second bottle of wine while nobody checks the time.

It looks like sex. Lots and lots of sex. More sexual experiences in the past three years than in the sixty-five previous. I will not apologize for those sentences.

It looks like erotic films in the dark with my wife Gina and painting erotic watercolors on handmade paper, the brush doing what the pulpit never let it.

It looks like clean food carried home from my neighborhood market, the butcher, the fishmonger, the vendors who know my face, ordered with my stumbling but slowly improving Spanish, cooked slowly and savored even slower.

That’s the list. I’m sure there is more. I read it back to myself. Body. Mind. Soul. Spirit. My true essence, melding together like the four movements of one symphony, no longer a place I am searching for, but a life I am actually living.

I sat down to describe my vision of paradise, the way I always have, as a place I am still trying to reach.

And somewhere around the first item, I stopped writing and felt the sea breeze coming through doors, walked to my fifth-floor terrace, spied the nude bodies across the street, and I started laughing.

Oh, wow.

Am I already there?