Page 57 of Saint
It was a pleasant farewell to what had been a pleasant stay, but as we’d boarded the train and found places for our suitcases, Elijah had said, perceptively, “Semois isn’t the one for you, is it?” and I’d answered with a reluctant nod.
Semois had been lovely: the beer was good, and the faith more than evident from all the brothers there. But there was no denying it was the mid-priced gray sedan of abbeys. An abbey too decent and well-engineered to say no to, but not the kind of thing to excite the heart. And I might as well stay at Mount Sergius with the people I already loved and my big hill and my creek if I wasn’t going to fall in love with anywhere else.
Anyway, from Luxembourg to Paris we went—me napping the whole way—and then we changed trains and headed south.
And now it was full daylight, and I could see farm fields and distant hills and dark hazes of small forests in the distance. Elijah has been writing in his laptop most of the time while I’ve been glued to the window like a kid, and I finally ask, “Are you working on your article?”
He finishes typing something as he shakes his head. “Emails right now. I’d pitched an article about how the work of TERF-y academics is helping fuel a wave of anti-trans legislation, and my editor said yes, but he’s also assigned me a piece on a new Dior line and another one about whether or not the martini is dead, so I’m trying to plan out what I need to do when in order to get everything written on time. And also figure out whether I should drink a martini again before I decide it’s dead in a national publication.”
“The martini is a classic,” I say.
“Vermouth is gross,” he counters without looking at me, and he does have a point.
I return to staring out the window, and he continues typing.
* * *
An hour later,he abruptly shuts his laptop and looks at me.
“Why the Church?” he asks without warning. I can tell from the intensity in his voice that this has been bothering him for a while...maybe even for the last several years. “You want to change your entire life, get away from it all, find yourself, whatever, I can understand that. But whythisway? You’d never given a single genuflecting shit about church or Mass or anything, and then bam—monk. You didn’t even try going vegan first.”
I don’t answer right away, rubbing at the scruff on my jaw as I search for an answer that doesn’t stray too closely to the full truth of that night—although I’m beginning to wonder if telling him is inevitable. I hope not. I don’t want to dump all that at his feet and make it seem like I’m trying to buy my way out of his justified anger at the way I left.
And also, even after years of therapy, I don’t know if I can frame the events of that night in words. That is the cruelest thing about depression: it is at the edge of speech, at the very edge of what words can shape and describe.
“I was sent a Bible verse,” I finally say, dropping my hand and looking at him. “That night. From a number I didn’t know. I still don’t know who sent it to me, actually. Only that it came when I needed to read it the most.”
When the darkness had been eating the stars as I watched through my window. As it spilled around my feet and slicked between my toes. And then there’d been a flash of bluish light.
I lift my eyes to the hills.
“You got a Bible verse,” Elijah repeats. “From a mystery number. And it made you decide to be a monk.”
“It had been a hard night,” I say honestly.
He drums his fingertips on the top of his laptop, that normally inscrutable mouth curving into a slight frown. “I remember,” he says, his voice short.
“You do?” I ask, and then a memory filters in, him in a suit, a vase of flowers in the trash.
“Ah,” I say quietly. “The fight.”
It had been swallowed up by the rest of the night in my mind, since it had been merely the cracked door which had let in the demons who’d been chasing me for years. It had been awful, yes, but the rest of the night had been so much worse.
Elijah works his jaw to the side. “Yes, Aiden. The fight.”
“For what it’s worth,” I say, “I am sorry. I am still so very, very sorry.”
“I’m sure you are,” he says.
He’d wanted to surprise me that night. Dinner, flowers, a declaration of love. But in typical Aiden fashion, I’d shown up late and half-drunk from a dinner celebrating a new deal at work.
It wasn’t unusual for me—I was late to a lot of things or I missed them altogether. I showed up a mess or I turned into a mess when I was there. Sometimes it was for easy-to-understand reasons, like a meeting running long, like oversleeping after an international flight. And sometimes they were for less easy-to-understand reasons—reasons I couldn’t even articulate if I’d tried.
Like sometimes I would truly,reallymean to remember something, but I’d get sucked into something else—work, play, whatever—and not realize that hours and hours had slipped by. Sometimes it would be because I’d get home after a long day of work and know I’d need to change to meet Elijah at some event or party, but I’d sink down onto my bed and find myself literally unable to move. And it wouldn’t be that I’d forgotten that the event was important to my boyfriend, and it wouldn’t even be that I didn’twantto go, because often I did. It was more like my pilot light would suddenly go out, and there would be nothing left to animate me, no heat or energy or life at all. Like being sunk into liquid concrete, sunk into a substance where even the slightest movement required superhuman effort.
But how do you explain that to a disappointed boyfriend and not have it sound like, “I chose to stare at a wall instead of come to the thing you explicitly told me was important to you?”
You don’t. You can’t.
