Guide my steps

Guide my steps

Alan Hancock 2024   

I watch him as he walks in the rain. If only he knew, how close I am, always, how much I care. He would be surprised, frightened maybe. And I don't want to frighten him. Not now. So close I can feel his poor heart.

He thinks he is a poet. He notes things down in the special notebook that he bought at the bookshop by the harbour. He goes there often, when he is lonely, when he wants to leave his lonely house and be part of the big world. I've followed him down there, watched him walk up and down the aisles of books and pick one up and start to read it. Sweetheart. As if the words might help him. I saw him buy the notebook and go the café, take out his pen from the back pack and start writing down the sad little thoughts. I'm always there when he has the sad thoughts—you could say that I know them like a part of myself. Like a muse. Something like that.

He goes to the poetry club in the café that never quite has enough people in it. He listens as other people read out from their notebooks then he claps, but he doesn't go and talk to them. My lonely boy. That's how he is. Once he got up there himself. He took the microphone in his hands and they were shaking. Not a lot, but enough so that the pages shook. He read out something he had written on the small pages, his heart beating hard like a big bird in a cage, his voice all quavering and fast. Love. I loved him so much then. Like an ache, this longing for him. My heart, my sweet heart.

Afterwards an older woman came and spoke to him. She said she liked his poem, though of course it wasn't really a poem, just his thoughts written down. And he said he had no idea where the words came from. If only I could have told him. It's me who puts the words inside you my love. All the time when the sad sweet thoughts come: it's me.

I love him when he listens to me. Sometimes a day can be eternity. Lonely, so lonely waiting for just the one soul. He knows all about that.

I go with him to our special place. Drive half the night because he can’t sleep, poor love, and when he thinks it is too far I tell him no, keep going. Don’t give up now. He’s often alone—when his friends are busy, when there’s no work and it’s a holiday, when the people all go away and he’s at home and no-one to talk with. Except me. That’s when he is close, when I want him here with me so much it hurts.

My world: how could he ever find the words for it, how could he ever imagine? Then he writes his story about when he was a boy and put the caterpillar in a jam jar, watched it weave its chrysalis and then one day it is a moth waiting at the glass. He opens the lid and it is flying to the window, blinded by the light. He can’t imagine, but maybe he can understand one little part of it. Flying into the light and all the dark spaces between us.

When we get there the car park is almost empty: it’s still early, and it’s raining. He likes that. He walks across the wet tarmac, past the smart new cars that are made for families and surf boards and friends. The air is salty and wet, there is the sound of big waves below us. We love this place. He goes past the sign that tells about the dangers of the cliff top, the king waves, the wind and the rocks, how it can be unsafe and one must stay behind the guard rail at all times.

The wind is very strong here and it pushes him back but he keeps going. When he gets to the rail he ducks under it, and goes over to the edge of the land. A long way down the ocean is all white and inky blue. It’s hitting the rocks so hard, he thinks, nobody could survive down there. There’s a little thought: what if he let go of the rail behind him, imagining the long drop down, the sudden cold shock, the water. To go under into all the white and blue and never come back up. Gone at last into the world of elements to become part of the wide ocean and its surging. He likes that idea and holds it in his mind. He leans back but he isn’t sure if he’s leaning forward or backwards and the wind pushes him hard. The soles of his feet tingle. Gone at last.

That’s why he comes here. My dear boy. So young and ready to fly away, and fly to me. Come, I say, I’m waiting for you. His clothes flap like rags in the wind; the sign is quite right, it isn’t safe here. Come, I whisper in my softest voice, enough. Nobody to care for his poor soul. Except me.

She won’t care. She left him. Hopeless, my lovely hopeless boy in this hard fast world all round him with the happy people and empty places. How many more lonely days? How much more sadness and the sad words in the notebook?

And me, waiting here for eternity: each of your days, for ever. I see you struggle with the words and when you do manage to put me down there, my love, my words on the little pages—my heart bursts. I wait for you somewhere so far and so very close, if only you could see. Infinite light and you flying through it to me. You with the stars in your eyes and in your heart, flying for ever and ever. Not like the sad days in the lonely house. I sleep there in your dreams, I know you better than any woman. Soon we will be together, in the light.

                                                 *                  *                     *

He puts the words on the page and before he reads it out in the little room to the strangers who fill only a few of the chairs he says it comes to him from somewhere else. My dear child. He sends up his prayer and I feel it, every word.

Take me away from my suburb and the empty street, the dead houses and the grass.

Yes.

There is no magic and no religion. There is no glorious struggle and no great victory, no romance and no bright future. There is just this—the normal days and the small money and tv, the fridge and the traffic and the washing and a lot of plastic. It's nothing and it's never ending and it's killing me inside.

Yes, I know.

I’m ready now, I've got nothing to lose, please. Let something happen in my life, anything, just something I'll feel.

Come.

Nobody cares, nobody knows who I am.

Come to me.

She’s gone. For ever.

I’m here.

I can’t face another day like this.

Why should you?

Even with people, so alone.

Always.

No point to anything.

Come.

And he looks up at the sky each night at the stars and the infinite darkness and awaits salvation. Or something quite different. My love.

*                     *                     *

He has put the idea in his head so many times, trying to imagine the answer and the impossible truth, the terrible wrenching free of something in this body, the sudden end. But the wild ocean and the hard rocks, that’s his favourite. That’s where he goes.

I wait and wait—such a long way down. So close. No distance now. There never was. And the wind blows so hard it might take him away.

I remember when we met. He looked at me. He looked into my world and he saw me and I looked back. I can’t tell you exactly what he saw. Nor can he. Maybe he’d say I was a dream, or a vision. I looked back and he was in my world and I was in his, for ever. He didn’t know that of course: for ever. He’d say it was the drug, a new one that people talked about because it came from the jungle and the wise old people who lived there. He’d say it was a vision he had because of the jungle people’s drug in his blood and in his head. And if he’d read the books he’d have known what the wise people said, how they warned that their drug was like a door or a window, and there was another world and other worlds that looked back. Something that looked back, and saw him, and waited. It wasn’t like watching tv. It was real.

He was running away but he came to my world and I was as real as the bedroom wall, real as the tree outside the window. He knew he couldn’t be the same after that, he knew he couldn’t go on, same as before. No need, my love. I found you and now I’ll never leave.

I feel your thoughts, the words you make. Always reaching out for the words and now you find me. Do you see— this whole wide world and me in it and what will you call me? I see the words shape inside you, and the questions you ask. Ghost? Angel? Dark angel. Yes. Your dark angel. Another world, waiting in the stars and darkness. Inside you, if you let me in. As if anything is separate, as if anywhere is not right here, inside. And so you write me, you put the story round us and make it true.

There he is, for ever on the edge, my darling boy, waiting. What is he waiting for? Time for him to open up and let all of me in, in his heart and his blood, run through him like one of his drugs and then I’m in his bones and his fingers, in his sweet blond hair. There he is in his moment, poised for ever, in the wind and the salt air and I know he is ready now. I don’t know what happens first but it’s all happening at the same time, and in this moment his fear is gone in the wind and he can feel me inside. And at last I can hold him. No words now, just the love and the stars, for ever.

He would say, if he tried to find the words to put in his notebook with his pen and the fluttering damp pages and his shaky hand, that something reached up inside him and took his poor heart. So gently. Falling, flying, lifting him high over the black rocks and the sea and held safe in its grip. His heart, his dear heart. And the wind sighs through him, the sea pushes us together and nothing can hurt him now. Free. He looks down and he can see someone walking back to his car. It looks like him but it’s a long way off and he can’t be sure. He knows that this is how it is going to be. No going back now. Safe at last from all fear and harm, together in our world. And he imagines trying to write it down, and even the thinking of it is too hard. But if he could, it would be just one word.

Heaven.

End.