STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN.

Chapter Six                                                                                                Part Seven



                     I live on an island in the Aegean sea.  I live on its shores with the sand and the wind.  I have not counted the suns and the moons that have crossed the sky since the boat that brought me here sailed away.  I live as a hermit who waits for the world to unweave itself and lie passively at his feet in one long thread, from horizon to horizon, so that he can stand at its centre and look one way to the past and the other way to the future.  I want to see clearly.  I want to look through mystery and see simplicity.  So I must write.
                    I was in Switzerland when the shadow came.  I was walking in mountains.  It was spring, the air was clean, the emerald grass was filled with flowers of many colours.  My heart carried no burdens.  I was a traveller.  I was free.  The mountains were mine.  The climbing, winding road was mine.  It was while my heart was wild and smiling that the shadow came.
                   I heard the quiet murmur of an engine.  I looked behind me and the nose of a car rounded the bend and its murmur grew to an angry roar.  The long black car drew up and stopped at my side.  Its flanks were sleek and gleaming, its spokes and grill were of silver and its glass lamps shone like jewels.  A chauffer in black coat and cap jumped out from behind the wheel.  He was a small, dark man with thick eyebrows and a grim, unopened mouth. He opened the car door behind the driver's seat and stood aside like an obedient racoon.  I looked inside and saw the Contessa.  A woman of elegance, a woman dressed in black. Diamond rings on her black gloved fingers, black feathers in her black hat and over her face was a veil of black spidery lace.
                    The Contessa bade me ride with her in the car.  My freedom was in the wind that blew me and I let the wind blow me into her darkness, a deceiving darkness that shone a deceiving light so that I thought that I could see when I could not.  My heart was not looking for shadows so how could I see the harm.         
                    I got in beside her, the racoon closed the door and then nothing was mine, not even my soul. She laughed at my rags.  We drove down the dark side of the mountain to her fairy tale castle on the shores of a glittering  lake and there I let her clothe me in finery and still I did not see the harm.  I saw only by the light of deception shining on each outfit she dressed me in, each place of fashion and importance that she took me to on her arm, each cold act of her bizarre egotistic love.  I could not see the harm.  Even as my mind, soul, heart and strength receded from me and began to fade like distant stars, I still could not see the harm.
                   I accompanied the Contessa from castle to villa to palace to grand hotel, from European capitals to country retreats.  We paraded and postured at operas and balls, high societies soulless worlds and battlefields of viscous charm.  The Contessa hung her bird like body on my arm and made a great pretence of my being her mainstay, her constant companion, her rod and her staff when I was nothing but her puppet.  The Contessa had put the strings deep inside my psyche and tied them to fear, negation, repression and self-doubt and she held and pulled them tight so that my pose was tall and manly at her side, afraid to show or see its own worthlessness or loss of pride.
                              The Contessa believed that my past was empty, that she had taken me from my rags and been my unselfish creator and benefactor who had bestowed upon me her selfless generosity, her guidance and her care.  She insisted that every word I had ever spoken and every thought I had ever thought had not been  of my own making, but inspired by her.  Her mania was powerful.  I weakened to her will.  I began to believe in my non-existence and I fell ill.
                              I saw nothing of the countries we visited.  I saw nothing of the cities of culture and art.  My eyes would look on scenes of great beauty and see nothing, because I no longer had a heart to see by.  The Contessa was the light of deception that shone in her own darkness, it was the only light I could see by and it had no heart.
                              Maybe deep inside I did see the harm, but my mind had been enslaved and would admit to nothing and in the Contessa's world of untold riches and lavish gifts my spirit was securely imprisoned in the darkness of denial.  I had not the strength to question my life.  All that I had been had indeed receded and faded and all that was left was a body that suffered fits and fevers , emptied of everything but a crying soul.
                             The Contessa thrived through my illness.  She wrapped me in warm smiles and soothing kisses and she took me back to her castle to watch me die.
                             I lay on my deathbed and looked out at the lifeless, land trapped waters of the spurious glittering lake.  I was after all the unicorn.  I had failed in my quest for life and lain fallow in the arms of wealth.  I was lost too far inland and too close to death for my soul to ever be freed in the waters of the ocean.  So I clung to the vision of the girl in the woods I would no longer find and the words of the book I would no longer write.  They were the my only secrets, the only treasure I had left and although both of them were unresolved their existence made me peaceful.       
                            The Contessa appeared in the doorway.  My peace disturbed her.  It was not the way she wanted it to be.  So she filled the room with a fiery passion of premature bereavement and violent weeping.  She spoke of love and happiness never before felt.  Her words like her love were empty and oh, how her kindness was so cruel.
                            Suddenly I could see.  In a time-locked moment of horrific enlightenment I saw that she was the harm I could not see. I saw that her coming into my room was how she had come into my life.  I had lain in the room peacefully so she took my peace away.  I had walked in the mountains freely so she took my freedom away.  All my failure and sadness that I had thought to have come from within me, had come from her.  The black widow had devoured.  The back widow had destroyed.  The Contessa was the sergeant and the sergeant was the Contessa.  I had killed and claimed the sergeant so the Contessa was killing and claiming me.  Again Satan had come to me and shown me lowliness and humiliation, but now that I saw it to be Satan I would again escape.
                           I looked back at the Contessa with a strong heart and eyes that showed thunder held back by calm.  I said nothing.  My wall of silence was both a weapon and a shield.  Her venom could not cross it and by denying the black widow her need to kill she would in turn be defeated and destroyed.
                           She saw that she had failed.  Her display had not hidden her deception.  White powder flaked from her ageing face, her eyes smouldered like black coals and her mouth was bitter.  Looked inside her madness and saw her belief that as my creator she had the power to choose the moment of my death. I rose from my bed to show her that I would not die.  She panicked, she screamed in the pain of her own venom.  Her screaming was high pitched and vile, it echoed the frenzied fears of the poisoned and the insane.             
                          I took back my rags and I walked back into the mountains.
                          I was alive and free but the stain of her venom was still within me.  My soul was embittered and my blood ran sour.  My strength writhed and fretted, I clung to the reins but I had no control. I travelled, tormented over land and sea until I came to this island.  And here I rest.  My solitude quietens my confusion. My heart has grown again and my eyes can see.
                         I am alone with sky, sand and sea.  We are all of us pale and uncoloured but for the sun god who taints us in the morning with a smiling pink and makes us warm and golden in the day and in the evening he leaves us sitting peacefully in the light of dusk and we watch his red fire fill the horizon and sink through the ocean to behind the world where we cannot see.  Then night comes to us but we do not sleep.  I sit on the silky coolness of the sand and listen to the sea.  I listen to its whispering as it rushes forward and I listen to its silence as it draws away.  The white light of the moon touches the crests of the waves and turns the black night deep blue.  The tide moves with the moon and the moon moves with the tide.  Neither one rules the other.  Like distant lovers their worlds touch , yet remain apart.
                        I am still haunted by the horror of spurious love and when these nightmares taunt me I let the ocean take my anger away.  I look out at the water and my imagination watches the Contessa's thin, black body being carried like a dead insect over the swell of each wave and with the vision my bitterness and my shame drift away and I am soothed again and calm.
                       Like the moon and the tide, love draws on love, love has no ruler.  If one is ruler then the other is ruled.  If one is destroyer then the other is destroyed and there is no love.  I was ruled.  I was destroyed.  I must accept that I am weak in order to be strong.  I must forgive those who have shown me my weakness and thus made me stronger and my shoulders broader to carry both weakness and strength, humility and courage.    
                     I look up and see a million stars in the sky and there are a million stars in the ocean.  They are reflections of each other.  That is the love I seek.  They are joined in the spirit, the ghost that will journey far, from ocean bed to furthest star.
                    Tomorrow I will swim out, far from the shore and I will dive to find the most beautiful shells.  They will be gifts from the Ocean to the Starshine.
                    Then I will leave this island and soon I will know her name.  She is Starshine, she guided me through my journey.  I am not the unicorn.  I am the Ocean and my anger is drowned.
                   I have been ruled.  I have been destroyed.  I am weak.  I am strong.  I am free.  I am found.  My search is at an end.



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                           I am in Italy.  I have walked many miles through its summer.  In the night I came to this place.  I felt the bird of sleep swoop down and touch me with its gentle wings.  So I lay down.  My weariness paid no heed to the stones and the roots on the hard, uneven ground.  I looked up at the sky and I understood why long ago, from my tower, I had seen clouds pass the moon .  They had foreboded the shadows that would pass over my heart, then clear and pass again.  But now the night was clear and the perfect fullness of the moon was undisturbed by clouds.  The bird of sleep flew over me and took away the tiredness in my body and the wanderings of my mind.
                         I awoke in an olive grove.  I sit with my back against the grey bark of an ancient tree.  Its branches encircle me in great arcs of kindness and concern, like the gnarled and twisted arms of an old man, and the tree looks down on me from above like a father blessing a child in the last embrace of boyhood before the child is sent forth into the world as a man.  The ancient smiles on me and encourages me and a light breeze whispers through the tree's tiny leaves of silver green.
                         The cool mists of morning rise and I see that I am on the outskirts of a red city.  Her love is near.  I have her shells wrapped in muslin.  My book has reached its end.  I have no more words and no more pages.          

               
                 

                                     STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter Six                                                                                                               Part Six


                               I am at the foot of a mountain.  I sit in the cool of a forest.  I am enclosed and safe in deep coniferous green.  I sit here blind to the rest of France, its cities and landscapes I have roamed, its wide, regal rivers and dusty summer roads.  I sit here to revisit them inwardly in my mind's clear visions and I sit here to write.
                             France's fields are once again sown with life and growing with tall, proud maize, yellow wheat and golden corn.  There are vineyards of succulent vines in neat ordered lines, there are crops of dark green tobacco and there are miles of sunflowers , giddy headed and laughing in the breeze.   
                            I remember walking down a lane.  It was long and winding and it rose over ridges, then fell again to rise over the next.  And as I climbed and reached the crest of each ridge, I could see another stretch of land before me, like a painting of colours growing from the ground.  Each painting was different and each one was beautiful.  Sometimes there were sleepy farmsteads, as old and timeless as the land, their ancient walls quietly tumbling while their rafters showed like ribs through the red tiled rooves.
                          I climbed a steep slope through a field of stubbled straw.  At first I did not see the grazing cows because they were straw coloured too.  Then I saw the lazy shake of the head and some large brown eyes.  I looked around at the hidden herd.  They were silent, unhurried and chewing.  They barely moved from their painting.  Sometimes an ear would flick or a slow, single step was taken towards another mouthful of straw.  Then the sun began to sink and the straw cows with their straw field were tinged with the palest pink.  I felt like a small boy in a world of enchantment where God is not a wrathful Lord but a kind magician.
                          I crossed other terrains that were dry and hostile, their land blistered by the sun.  I crossed the marshes of wild horses and there I had feelings of madness and death.  I tried to cross quickly to avoid them but my heart was nervous and oppressed, heavy and burning, like white hot lead, molten and running with fire.  I felt panic.  I felt there was an assailant behind me driving me forward too fast so that I would fall and drown in foul mud.  There was no escape.  Capture was imminent.  Running was futile and the more futile it became the more I ran.  These moods were feverish and tangled.  They wove darkness and unhappiness around me like a black shroud that kept out light.  There were no reasons.  The suffering was suffered but unexplained.
                        At last I came to a town.  The strength of the sun turned its pale stone to white so that its beauty stood clear and sharp beneath the sapphire sky.
                             I found the market place.  I stood amidst its bustle.  I felt the touch of humanity as its crowds brushed past me and I heard its voices, its shouts and its whispers close to my ears. My dark pain was eased and my loneliness withdrew.  I stayed all day and watched the colours. Canopied stalls and barrows of peppers, tomatoes and aubergines, ripe and shining.  Pale pinks and greys of shellfish.  Yellow cheese and dark red hams.  Chickens and hens scratched and flapped in their cages.  Pigs squealed.  There were rolls of bright cloth, rows of leather shoes, piles of pots and pans and pyramids of brown and white eggs.  It was a place of plenty.  It was a place of sweat and haste, frowning brows, and lips moving fast with the fury of barter and business.
                           At midday the church bells rang out.  A young woman came to me with wine, bread and cheese.  She was small and elfin, dark eyed and olive skinned.  She wore a cotton dress of red flowers on pale green, her arms were bare to the summer heat and her hair was in long black braids.  In the evening when the market disbanded and drifted away, leaving me alone in an empty square, she was still there.  She took my hand and led me to her home.  She nursed my weariness and she gave me her warm, unashamed love.  Her dark, lithe body was gentle and wild, silent and alive.  Her young girl's breasts, the sweet dew between her slender legs, she gave and I took.  I stayed with her too long.  I stayed with her until one day I saw her pretty eyes were seeing me forever, then I knew I had to go.
                         As I left the town I saw its broken bridge.  Half a bridge spanning half a river, as though its heart had broken half way across and it was never able to reach out and touch the other side.  She yearned so to give.  I could not give myself just so that I might take.  I left her with a child growing inside.  I hope she will not always be sad.
                       There is only one I search for.  Her eyes were filled with the fear of giving.  She stood before me in the woods knowing that her fate was to give herself and lose herself without knowing where or why.  And all I could do was give her an apricot stone.
                       Now that I sit in the quiet of this forest I realise that the apricot seed is my heart.  It is my heart that I put in the palm of her hand.  I am still compelled to search for her even though I do not know her name.  So I know that she has kept my heart and I will search until I have found her.
                      First I must sleep.  Then I must leave this verdant womb and climb the mountain.  I must climb high so that I can fall and climb again.
                      There is so much more to understand.    
                     


















                            

                                      STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN

Chapter Six                                                                                                           Part five



                              This morning I arrived in Southampton.  I went straight to he docks.  I helped load a cargo of fine walnut furniture and in return for my labour a kind captain has let me aboard to sail the channel.  
                               I was once before bound for the same shores, but they were the shores of a battle field not the shores of France.
                              The day is pale grey.  Gulls surround the ship with their ugly flapping and squawking.  In spite of their noise I feel peaceful, I feel free, no wishes, no purpose, no burden, no soldier's pack, no rich man's wallet, just a pocket knife and a lead pencil in the pockets of my leather jerkin and I carry my precious book of words already written and pages yet to be filled, in the deepest most secret pocket , close to my heart.
                              I look at the grey waters of the channel and I wonder at all the depths and all the secrets of all the seas and all the oceans.  On land I stand above the ground so that I have to stand and live as a man, but I cannot stand on the sea, it is not my home, it overpowers my existence, it humbles me, it drowns my confusion, it drowns my life and its meaning and makes me feel at peace.  The ocean is independent, unrepressed in storm or calm.
                             I watch the waves drawing and swelling.  I watch the ebb and the flow and I wonder what lies ahead, what will be given to me and what will be taken away.  I try to think but I cannot, my peace is such that there is no future, no past, just the ocean.
                            If ever I do not find the girl in the woods and cannot know her name, then I will let the sea bury me.  Like the unicorn, I will let the ocean swallow me and make me a part of it, another myth it will hold, another secret that is glorious and free.






















   

                                        STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter Six                                                                                                              Part Four



                    I have returned to my tower.  The war is over.  My body is whole.  My life is mine.  I feared death so badly.  Every day I thought it would take my search from me so that I would never be found.  I saw the faces of the dead.  Wide, staring, rigid fear as the moment of their death showed them that they were lost forever.
                    The sky was light with no sun and dark with no moon.  Sun and moon had forsaken us.  Every day and every night there was mud.  Every day and every night there was blood.  Every day and every night there was screaming.  When the shells and the gunfire ceased, the silence was wretched, too long and too evil to bare. Our breaths and heartbeats were soundless as we listened to the black silence and while we waited for more gunfire the gas would seep in.
                    All of this we returned to the enemy.  We exchanged our deaths for theirs, our mutilations for theirs.  Our guns and their guns were made by women whose labour had been withdrawn from homes and fields.  Our gas and their gas were cruel, cunning chemicals produced by the minds of learning and science.  On both sides were men who dug ourselves into the ground and lived as rats.  If our flesh was not ripped and our blood not spilt then we waited for the gas to dissolve our lungs, and if not the gas, then we waited for the trench mud to rot us from the feet up and turn us into gangrene.  Why ?
                   One night the reaper showed himself to me.  Guns rattled.  Shells sang.  I ran crouching, ready to throw myself down.  My boots were caught in barbed wire and the ground exploded before my face.  No fire, no flash, just a wave of dark earth under which I lay suffocating.  It closed in around my face, around each limb, no part of me could move. Its weight pressed down on my ribs and chest and my breath began to empty from my body. I waited for the scythe to sweep low, for my search to end, for my life to escape me into sleep and death.  And as I lay waiting I could still hear the sergeant's commands.  Commands I had obeyed. Commands that had led me to my grave.  I heard hunger in his voice and although I was buried deep in the ground I saw madness in his eyes.  They were predator's eyes, they trembled with an intensity, a vile greed.  The sergeant had led us like a lion, no soldier had doubted him.  In our foot weary weakness his strength had made our dead limbs move.  He held his face in stiffened expressions of forthrightness, concern and even kindness.  I lay beneath my mound of earth and saw clearly that the masks his face had worn had mocked us.  It was not strength but fear he had sown and nurtured inside us.  He had disguised his devilry and confused our souls.  Our minds were inert.  Our hearts were pushed down beneath the bulk of a dark mountain that was ignorance and blindness.  The sergeant stood at its summit, wielding supremacy and power.  He gained our trust and summoned our deaths.  Our obedience was unsuspecting while he despatched his orders to the reaper, the most obedient and servile of all his subjects.              
                        I would not die for the sergeant.  My body surged up. The heavy mud flowed like the loose, caressing waters of the ocean and I rose from my burial to see that the black velvet sky was jewelled with many bright stars.  My search had not reached its end.  I had to find the girl in the woods.  I had to know her name.
                       The sergeant did not see my shadow return.  He was alone in the trench.  He looked out at all that was destroyed, his breath rasped hard and fast, his joy was insane.  I faced him.  My strength rose and burned like the sun.  I looked into his eyes.  I saw treachery, I saw malevolence. He was a soul of Satan, a purveyor of death.  I had never before seen these truths, I had never believed in these evils.  Anger pierced me like white fire.  I felt his darkness tremble, discovery was striking down his guise, his pretence was tumbling like walls, there was nowhere for him to hide.  I was killing him with white fire and black silence.  There was nowhere he could run.  Satan had turned his back on his servant.  The sergeant was alone.
                        Few returned.  Those who did had heard their misplaced deaths being called in the sergeant's command. They too had snatched at life and been reborn.  Behind their pale faced exhaustion their fires burned with the awfulness of the revelation and the terror of its truth.
                        Our small company retreated.  Days of marching followed.  The sergeant led us.  We killed him slowly.  We watched his madness writhe to our cold immunity.  The sergeant awaited our mutiny.  He tried to resume his insidious ways but his cruelty would not manifest itself in us.  We would not liken ourselves to him.  We would not blackmail, we would not persecute, we would not speak. Our anger was silent, our violence was enclosed in calm. 
                        We came to a wood one warm day.  We sat in dappled shade with our backs against the trees and we dozed.  There was birdsong high up in the branches.  I heard the snap of a twig underfoot.  I opened my eyes.  The sergeant had realised that he was a prisoner and was trying to escape his guards. I picked up my rifle and shot.  I shot him dead.  I shot him in the back.  I shot him in cold blood.  I shot him in hatred.
                        I have returned to my tower, yet I feel I have not returned.  I must leave again at dawn to continue my search.  I will not return until I am found.  May be I am the unicorn.  There is so much  I do not understand.






















                   

                          STARSHINE, THE OCEANAND THE UNICORN
Chapter Six                                                                                                   Part Three


                             I have returned to my tower.  I return to my house as I left, with nothing. 
                             I looked back to when I left here.  It was dawn.  I walked many miles through the early mists, then I climbed a hill.  I climbed up high out of the mists and into the sun. I stood on the hill top.  All that I had been was behind me, left in shadow.  I looked out over the world.  A mist lay over it but I knew that it was there.  It was there for me.  I was filled with ecstasy.  I walked its pathways and lanes, I worked its fields and seasons.
                             Colour, texture, sky and earth, summer heat and winter chill, they touched and clothed me and I lived within them.  I ate, I drank, I slept, I woke, I ploughed, I sowed, I harvested.  I made no judgements. My mind was silent.  I toiled, I let my body flow with land and season.  At harvest time and Midsummer's night, farmsteads revelled.  Folks feasted and the fiddler played.  I sang, I danced, I made love to bright eyed maidens whose kisses were warm and yielding, their caresses unhindered, their secrets unsealed and flowing.  All this time I was happy.
                            Then one day the sky was dark grey and a heavy rain fell, I was leading two sturdy shires while Sam guided the plough.  Sam was a man of the land and its creatures.  Sturdy and tall like his horses as he fought his bare chested battle with the soil.  He fought for his family's livelihood come drought or storm and he never lost.  Sweat on muscled shoulders, naked back and muddy arms as he struggled to guide the heavy plough.  Its blades were dragged through thick, wet earth, turning over the brown sticky mud and churning up stones and the dead white roots of the last crop, like scattered bones.  I felt a darkness and a fear.  It filled me.  I did not know whether it was a nightmare not remembered or one not yet seen.  Then I saw the gypsy at the side of the road.  We stopped the plough.  Sam walked over and offered the lonely traveller bread and cheese.  She thanked him for his kindness and she warned him to stay at home with his plough for there was another field of mud and another dark sky across the water from which he would not return.  Sam laughed, his heart did not head her.  She looked at me.  I stood with the horses.  I saw her tired, furrowed face and her deep sad eyes where secrets hide.  Her sorrow was my sorrow.  The darkness is yet to come.
                    So I put away pen and paper and go to war.  The moon is but a fingernail.  Time is still unwound and sleeping.  I am still lost.  I wish I knew her name. 























      

                                      STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter six                                                                                                            part two



                      I have been to London and returned again to my tower and my desk.  It is three days since I saw her. But what are days?  What are nights ? What is time ? Now that I have begun this journey time must be ignored.  Haste would lead me to some vile compromise, a disillusionment that it would have been better never to have begun, never to have stepped out onto the road.  It is not a journey of roads and directions I will choose and then travel, it is a journey of roads and directions that will come to me when it considers me ready and there will be no accounting for the passing of years, if I am to find her.
                     Time has always stood like a cloaked spectre at my shoulder, pushing me on towards death, holding up its black robes to block out the lights of discovery and reflection.  There will be no clocks or calendars while I search. 
                      My trip to London was the first stage of my journey.  It was a preparation, a purchasing of a ticket.
                    I had packed all my clothes and trinkets, my suits, my tweeds, every outfit for every occasion, my insignia of wealth and belonging.  They filled three trunks.  At Waterloo station I watched them being unloaded from the train.  I looked at them on the platform. They were unnamed and unlabelled.  I walked away.  My step was light as though I had shed many skins that had grown hard on my back and shadowed my heart.
                   I walked through the city from office to office, from broker to banker to lawyer. My task was to extricate myself from the web of finance and the compulsive, infinite weaving of its sticky threads.  I sold my stocks and recalled my shares.  I held my wealth in one hand in deeds, bonds and bankers' notes, three million pounds, just pieces of paper.  I folded them down and put them inside a small leather pouch.  I drew and tied the thongs and the pouch was closed.  I placed the pouch inside a leaden box embossed with a unicorn.  I sealed the box with candle wax.  I took the sealed box to my bank and locked it in a vault.  I went to m y lawyer and gave him the key to the deposit box.  Then I was free.
                          The summer heat baked the city streets, while each office was chilly.  I carried the sun with me into each meeting, its light shone from my eyes.  My face was stern while my heart smiled.  I said little.  I watched.  I had once carried their faces and their armour as my own.  I had also been a warrior blind to the loss of life in battle.  But now I had laid down my shield and my spear, my knuckles were no longer white with the need to clutch them and believe in their protection.  I had no protection and no weapon.  My defencelessness was my power.  I had uncovered my body and my face.  The light that shone from my eyes said,
                                                                                      " This is who I am "
                                                                                                                       In every office, across every desk my silence said,
                                             " This is who I am. "
                                                                               They could not draw me back through the wheels and the cogs because my silence simply said,
                                                                         " No. "
                                                                                      I could not be drawn back to their sense of duty, their established patronage and competition.  My silence said,
                                                                                                    " No. "
                                                                                                                I watched their fear rise as they realised that to question me was to question what was to them unquestioned.  I watched my conquered rivals falter and die.  My commands were obeyed and my enemies slain.
                       I gave Mr Hodgekins the key.  I told him it must be submitted to no one but the unicorn.  I did not know why. I hope I am not the unicorn.
                       Tomorrow I will leave this notebook and pen in my desk in my tower.  Tomorrow I will leave this house.  I will wander through its rooms and touch its furniture.  I will wait until the old grandfather clock stops and then I will leave.  I will leave Time unwound and sleeping.
                       I love this house.  My mother and father lived here.  They were distant and quiet.  I did not know them.  They did not know me.  I lived here alone as a child and still I live here alone.  This is my home.  Tomorrow I must close it up.
                       But I will return.  I sit at my desk and look through the window of my tower.  It is night and the moon is full.  Clouds like black smoke pass in front of the bright moon so that it fades and clears but it never disappears.                      
























  























   

                                  STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THEUNICORN
Chapter Six                                            The Ocean                                                   Part ten


                     Joe awoke still huddled on the floor.  It was dawn.  Outside the sky was pink.  He looked around the room, Clare has disappeared.  He ran upstairs to the tower.  The puzzle lay unfinished on the floor, but he knew now what the puzzle would say.  It was the school desk beneath the window that was the only thing left for him to know and understand.  He sat at the desk and lifted up its lid. Inside there was a pocket sized book bound in leather.  The ink well rattled as he brought the lid down too suddenly with a bang, in  his eagerness to discover the contents of the book.  He looked through it, the pages had yellowed, it had been written in a neat, slanting hand, the first half in watery brown ink and the last half in faint lead pencil. He turned back to the beginning and sitting at the desk with his face bent close to the page and his tired eyes squinting at the faded lettering, he began to read.



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              Today I saw a girl in the woods.  She was beautiful.  She was lost.  I love her.  She stood before me but I have to search for her to find her.  If I find myself I will find her.  I ate the flesh of an apricot and I gave her the seed.  Then I left her to begin my search.
               So I sit at my desk in my tower and write. There is only this school desk.  Algebra and alphabet, history books and maps, my sweet governess, her soft eyes and tidy bun of shiny hair are all gone.  I am alone with the memory of the girl in the woods.
               Her figure is slight and nimble.  Her face is uncertain and childlike.  Her eyes are deep brown, they are intense, foreboding sadness, filled with a fear too close to see, filled with a thousand tears not yet shed.  Her hair is the red brown of chestnut, its thick locks flow over her shoulders, uncombed, disarrayed.  She is clothed in wealth and sophistication that is not hers.  She wears cream satin and white lace  but she has walked through the fields and the earth's dust has marked them. Her dress is a casing that cannot contain her.  She is wild. She is fay.  I know this vision but I do not know her name.  I wish I knew her name.