Page 83 of Saint
He looks so beautiful like this, with the wide river behind him and the moonlight gleaming on his chiseled features, and with all the smart things he said at the Tate still lingering in my mind and with all the funny things he said at the bar lingering too. He is the kind of man you give your entire heart to, the kind of man you ache for, the kind of man you buy a house with and adopt a dog with and the kind of man you marry.
And I left him.
And suddenly, I don’t want Father Jordan’s words to be true anymore, I don’t want there to be any secrets between us. I want to explain to him why I left, about what really happened that night so he can understand that it was never, ever about him, that it was all my fault, and that I didn’t see any other way to stay alive and stop hurting him at the same time.
I want him to know, even if he despises me after, because I don’t want there to be anything about me that he doesn’t know. I want him to know me as well as God knows me, to know my sittings and my risings, to find me at the farthest reaches of the sea.
I want to be entirely his, even if it’s only for one night by the Thames.
I lean in to kiss him again, seeking courage from his lips, pulling strength from his mouth.
“You’re kissing me like you’re already saying goodbye,” he murmurs, and I lift my head a little to look at him.
I need to tell him. I want to tell him, give him this one last burnt offering under the moon.
“Elijah,” I say, not sure how to begin, but he must hear the difference in my voice, he must see something on my face, because he shakes his head decisively and presses a long finger to my mouth.
“No,” he says, and I think he means to say it firmly, but there’s a catch in his voice on theopart of the word, like he can’t push the word out fast enough. “No. Not tonight.”
“You don’t even know what I was going to—”
“Please,” he pleads, and his other hand fists even harder in my shirt. It breaks my heart a little. “Whatever it is, it can wait. It can wait until we’re cold and gloomy tomorrow, it can even wait until we get home. But tonight I just want our what if. Tonight I just want—I want—”
His voice breaks again, and I don’t have the stomach to force him to finish. “Hey, it’s okay,” I say, leaning in to kiss his face with soft, soothing kisses. “It’s okay. I won’t say it. Tonight will just bewhat if. I promise, I promise.” And I keep layering his cheeks and mouth and jaw with kisses; I kiss the corners of his eyes and the shallow depressions of his temples; I kiss him until his hips are restless and searching against mine and the only thing we can do is stumble back to our hotel, where I get to my knees and start sucking him the minute we get inside his hotel room.
The only thing we can do is kiss and peel each other out of our clothes, and fuck more than once, fuck again and again, on the bed and in the shower and against the big window overlooking the street below. The only thing we can do is hold each other as we fall asleep together for the first time in almost five years, and when I feel the slow, wet leak of Elijah’s tears on my naked chest, the only thing I can do is hold him even tighter. Because I love him and I would play thewhat ifgame forever if I could, but I can’t, I can’t. I built my life around being a monk—I built mymindaround being a monk. I can’t surrender what saved me.
Even for the sweetestwhat ifI’ve ever known.
Right?
43
from the notebook of Elijah Iverson
Franciscan friar Richard Rohrsays that there are two kinds of time, at least according to the ancient Greeks. There is chronos—or chronological, ordered time—and then there is kairos.
Kairos is subjective, qualitative. Deep Time is what Rohr calls it. A fullness, he says. The moments when the dots of our lives connect.
I’ve been living in Deep Time these last two weeks, in medieval monasteries where monks sing prayers thousands of years old and where Aiden looks at me like I’m a human hymn. For a handful of days, I have been suspended with him, and maybe even with God, inside that fullness, all my dots connecting, hovering, shimmering.
My inbox didn’t matter, deadlines didn’t matter. Even the relentless notifications on my phone fell away as the shitty monastery wi-fi flickered in and out. Theping pingof DMs, emails, news alerts, and more news alerts—the heartbeats of my day—simply stopped. And when the wi-fididwork and my phone came to hectic life at last, that insistent glass rectangle felt as gaudy and cheap as a slot machine in my hand.
So what did matter in that fullness?
His fingers laced in mine.
The wind on our faces, the echo of voices against stone.
Honey beer on my tongue and stillness, stillness, stillness inside.
My eyes hurt today, and I wish I could say it’s from the dry air of the airplane as we whoosh our way to Dublin, but instead it’s because I spent the night crying on the chest of my monk ex-boyfriend. We left the kairos behind for the very real, very frenetic chronos of London, and it was dazzling, dizzying, being in the real world with Aiden Bell. But.
But.
I just want to be with you, he said in the Tate Modern, but we were in real time again, in chronological time. Time measured in hours and minutes—time that passed so fucking fast that before I knew it, it was gone.
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