Four: The Road To Rouen

I tumbled from the spindle, my thread melting through the thinness behind me. Oh I am a lost soul, lost, flitting through Heaven, dancing along the Polaroid surface of hell, polishing the expanding ripples with my lonely songs and frantic travails. My thread unravels through icy thin air, and the sun swoops a thousand swoops, turning the filament to blinding white light. I wonder why it won’t burn, why it won’t collapse in a cloud of ash, and let me flutter away, into the Disconnect that I joined when my madness took hold that cold and windy Sunday.

My journey, unended on earth, unrounded off, preternaturally pushed into the beyond, continues to some nowhere place that I do not know where.

So I float above the Earth, unsure how to navigate, exploring without knowing. I spent seasons wandering through cobbled towns before I realized it was France. And perchance you zipped through the strand of my web, and brought some sense to my unfilled ghost.

It was not just you, but a crowd that filled a French TGV that soared across a lush countryside and passed right through me. I tumbled and twisted, my silver energy sparking through a thousand dim and bright lit souls until yours, resonated orange through all the blue.

I curled back and plucking a bolt of lightning that sagged slowly off a looming grey thunderhead, I hitched forward and zagged onto the soft carpet of the train. I noticed your feet, staring out of the aisle, on droopy sandals. I saw someone else glance at you, with a twinkle in their eyes.
I slowly drifted to your arm, and peeked around your ear, to see your lips murmuring something.

I could feel my thread falling further behind me, like microscopic amounts of salt that depart the body in a single bead of sweat.
I felt the thread funneled as the train shot through a tunnel. I felt it swing in the spiritual turbulence around me. It took me a time, you know, to discover how to maintain a presence on a moving object, on a swinging object, in an expanding universe. It’s a dizzying mixture of dimensions, and feeling them doesn’t make navigating them much easier. And you always have to go back the way you came. That’s how it works. For me anyway. This can be an impossible return journey if you travel too far under a foreign power. As I am doing now. I feel myself slipping undone, ever so slightly, the great limitless power, flowing quickly out of my back along the silver thread that ties me to heaven.

I watch you in the train for a long time. I reflect, as usual, when I look at you. I see, suddenly, how disoriented I am. I have even lost track of time, because here you are, younger, your hair, burnt wheat, on your shoulders, and a darker, serious shade, above your ears. You comb back a strand, and it sparks gold right beside the dark hairs above your white floral ears. You are at least one good thing I have brought into existence on the earth. You are the result of the creation flowing through me.

Your eyes are sad and smart, piercing me from time to time as someone passes through with chocolates, or biscuits, or visiting the toilet.
And then the countryside outside slows down, and my energy vibrates better. You pull a small black backpack onto your shoulders and emerge.
I’m zapped away as a bolt of lightning draws a tremendous surge out of my thread – a tiny wisp, rainbowing in miniature across massive fields and villages and available to the vast extent of the storm.

I find the railway track, and drift low to avoid the squall. I finally find you, when the sun breaks between thunder cathedrals and the purple horizon. You are walking on a road with your companion.

I can see into your backpack. Magazines. Five pornographic magazines. A letter from an ex-girlfriend…no, an email, printed out. Lots of exclamation marks. She says you’re shallow, and empty, and selfish. She says that all you do is what you want to do. There’s also a newspaper, and a guidebook, and you’ve underlined a lot of information about Jean d’Arc. Is this your fixation, your preoccupation? Is this what you care about today? There are even photocopies here, and scribbled notes, and things you've underlined. Is this your latest passion? Does this suck all your attention away from work and everyone and everything else in the here and now?

Your companion is talking but you don’t seem to be listening. You don’t even seem to be looking at the unrepeatable beauty breaking around you. The sun has strobed golden beams over the fields. God’s fingers reach out and touch your face. But you swing your young head, and then flick the hair out of your eyes.

Why are you walking along this stretch of road? Where do you think you’re going? Why are you here and what is it you think you are doing now with your life? These are questions, you know, I am still asking myself, even out here. I think I have been here before. I think it’s the road to a place where Joan of Ark was burned at the stake. I’ve seen the plaque. You’re on the same road she took, to Rouen, but without the same God to guide you. You walk past a sign along the side of the road. Do you see it? Do you see any of the signs along the road. Do you even know you’re on the road to Rouen?