Five: Birds

I don’t know how I lost you. I suppose I lost myself. I still lose myself, and so I worry that the same fate floats towards you. I’m sorry, I don’t have answers. I thought I did but I don’t.
You’re surefooted. You’ve always been, walking confidently towards ballooning question marks, hot air ballooning around tall Christian Marks, crisscrossing your landscapes. Your Road to Rouen is just one of your sacred pilgrimages through another first pious, then profane period in your life. And it was in Rouen that I could not compose myself, and the birds fluttered down and gathered the thread and fluttered off with it towards the fabric of Life. I swarmed with them, their wings tying me in knots as they beat me from the way to heaven. I tossed and fell between them and somehow got so tangled in their beaks and feathers and bits of wood and feathering their nests that I couldn’t get out.

I could not hear them, but their black wings poked daggers against the sun, and broke the window glass sky into jagged ink. I felt my spirit slump, and the cord flying up the sky seemed to me, to become threadbare, and dry, and rough like a feather caked in mud, and robbed of its capability. I felt myself drowning in eternity, feeling that at any moment, my fragile spirit would dissipate into nothing, and my identity would fragment and be taken up by new spirits forming from the debris of the lost and decomposed.

There is no time in Heaven, just the eternal Now, which, you know, is also a continuous unfolding on earth, only…I cannot explain it except to say on earth there are only the shadows and the sun, the breaths we breathe, every single one, and the journey we run. Above the Earth the world is altogether different. It is more spacious, it’s faster, but it’s a peaceful swiftness, and vivid and beyond beautiful, but even here, it’s what you make of it.

I was not ready when I came here, and it shows. I sometimes fall out, the way you fall out of a dream, or fall out of bed. I strike the Earth like lightning when I least expect it, although I am finding I can feel the energy collect, I can feel the pregnant clouds swell just before the blast. I don’t know if I will ever completely control these lightning crashes through the Heavenly Host. I feel that I am sending myself back to resolve something, but I’m not sure if I can resolve it without being alive. You see, there’s an immediate knowledge of the place, the value and wonderfulness of Life. But since Life is the foundation for the afterlife, and I…well, I rained on my own parade. And it is the sort of rain, you well know, that kills that spirit, and that will not let any seeds grow in its bitter bitter soils. It is this rain that still douses my spirit in the nuclear catacombs. These are the bitter bolts that now throw me back to earth, even when I walk the ceilings of the Sistine vaults buried deep inside the blue, blue sky.

Are these birds another message, to remind me of the heart of my darkness? I can hear a gentle, No, and an even gentler refrain. Let it all flow through your being. Are they words, or is the message really just a sense of knowing? You see, I am learning some things. There are some things I can see. Implicit in that message is a sense of letting go, of not wanting, of not looking for anything. I know, I know. I try. I do.
But I can’t. I can’t not yearn. That was the end of my existence, the way I was birthed into this Day. I am doomed to be tied to the wings of dark birds that flicker like black fire upon the angry fingers of a winter forest fringe hugging the outer edge of an empty, withering landscape. So my sadness calls to me when I catch a fragment of blue or sweet, sweet green, between their deadly wings, and the stabbing and jabbing of midnight beaks.

And it might all end there, in these defeats and laments, except that spirit of Truth swims through me, suddenly, like a breeze through leaves, rippling against flight feathers. I grow weary from wanting, I rest instead of resisting, and then I begin to untangle…like a curled up bug finding itself alone and unthreatened. I see you again. It happens little by little. I see these jagged wings turns gray and green, into parrots and parakeets. I sow my thread into the deep deep down and skittle through the lava fields of time until I erupt through the millet earth, surrounded by a birdcage, and drawing myself out of the body of one of your birds. I snake along the barky perch, and as I swell away from my primeval form, I am absorbing the golden yellow light that is spreading over the peach trees, the wendy house, and the warm trampoline beside the nodding flowerbeds. It all swells through me like a happy memory. And here you are, in your prison bar school uniform. You’re sitting in the aviary, with a cockatiel on your shoulder, and one in your hand. The one in your shoulder tries to kiss you… No, it’s pecking at the knotted silver braces running like a railway around your mouth.

Oh I remember the braces. You used to be so loud, but the wires shut you down, over those five years, the laughter went mute and the shouting stopped, and still they made you wear them. I’m sorry. I look into your clear eyes and I wish you could see.

You stand up. I notice that a bird has left slimy white glob on your Grey blazer. You’ll be in the hall today and everyone behind you will snicker and laugh while you write your exams. But I’m sure you’ll get through them, with or without the opportunity to concentrate. I see that the bird in your hand in dead. You walk slowly out of the cage, with your dead bird, and walk to the shade of the huge Elm tree in the corner of the garden. It’s so big because it is growing under a garbage heap. This is where the garden boy and your father unload the lawnmower, dumping more and more piles of damp sawn off kikuyu blades. You brush away the outer layer of grass. It smells faintly like horses. Inside the mountain of grass, it is yellow and hot. You put the bird in this soft yellow oven, and run a finger along its yellow crest, and hardening grey back.
Then you cover the small hole, stand up and go to school.
I wait here, by the dead bird, as if tied to it, by silver string, while you wander away into the lonely, lonely world.