Page 96 of Saint
But when I get to his door, it’s already open.
Open to an empty room.
There’s a slow, sinking feeling moving through me—not like my heart or my stomach sinking, but like my entire body. Like my entire body is sinking right through the floor, right into the cool stone and even lower still.
Not again, I think numbly, staring at the empty room and thinking of the one in Mount Sergius. Of the day exactly like this when Elijah left me without saying goodbye.
Not again.
A brother I’ve only met in passing joins me at the door. “I heard your friend went with Father Finbarr to Galway today,” the monk says cheerfully. He passes me to move into the room, where he starts industriously stripping the bed. “I hope Father Finbarr stops along the way to show him some of the sights. No point in coming out to this end of the world if you aren’t going to make the most of it!”
Everything sounds both lovely and wise in this monk’s Irish accent, but I register almost none of it. I’m too numb.
“Excuse me,” I murmur. “I’ve just forgotten something.”
I don’t hear what he says in reply, but it doesn’t matter, I’m already striding as quickly as I can to my room, shutting the door and leaning back against it as I fight for breath, as I fight not to cry.
Elijah could have gone to Galway for anything; he could be planning on coming back. So what that his room is being stripped, cleaned, presumably readied for the next guest? That doesn’t have to mean he isn’t coming back here...
But I think I know the truth even before I open my burning eyes to see the letter on my pillow. Before I go to it and unfold it and read the words written there.
It’s torn from the pages of a small notebook and written in Sharpie pen. The hand is neat, precise, not looking at all like it was written in a hurry. Which means it was probably written last night.
Aiden,it begins.
I debated whether or not to leave without saying goodbye. I prayed about it even. It is ironic that I’ve spent so many years hurting over the way you left without a proper explanation, and yet here I am leaving you for the second time without giving you one. If I didn’t understand after you told me your story, I think I’d understand even better now that I’m faced with the same choice myself.
Except I am going to give you an explanation now—or at least the best one I can, given the circumstances.
My explanation is also a confession: every time I came to you, from the time I told you about my engagement to the time I boarded a plane to Luxembourg, I came with doubts. Not healthy, emotionally capacious doubts, you see, but cynical ones, hard and narrow and sharp. In a way, it was doubt that kept me returning, almost as much as the hunger to be near you. It’s an ugly thing to admit, but there it is. I’ve been pressing my fingers into your wounds over and over again, because belief felt impossible. How could the Aiden I’d known and loved be this same man who chanted psalms and listened intently to every word everyone around him spoke? How could this former millionaire who rarely wore the same suit twice stand nearly naked in a field of lavender and grin at me with sore muscles and petals stuck to his sweaty skin as if he’d never been happier?
How could it be the same you? The you I knew?
And how could this be the work of the same Church I have such complicated feelings about? The Church at its most esoteric, its most privileged, and its most exclusive?
But even Thomas eventually believed, and now so do I. It took weeks of wrestling with it, weeks of coming back and leaving and coming back again. It took me to strange rivers and mountains and finally to the edge of the world with you, where there’s nothing but wind and salt and graves so old they have more graves on top of them. It took more than watching—I think if I’d only watched, I never would have understood. It took praying the prayers with you, spending the days tethered between the work of the world and the work of the spirit, pulling my life away from the chimes and pop-ups and crashing deadlines and hot takes. Cloistering. That’s what it took. I cloistered with you.
And I understood.
I understand.
I understand why you came, and why you stayed, and why you saw a future for yourself like this. And that is why I cannot take it from you.
I will never regret spending these days with you—I don’t think I’m capable of it, actually. An hour with you is like the fullness of years anywhere else, and maybe it was worth living an entire life just to have those hours alone. Which is why I can’t tarnish them this way—by having them be the reason you leave a life that has given you yourself and given you your god.
I love you too much to do that, and I love myself too much to do it either, because what I said in the hermitage is still true, Aiden. I can’t compete with fireflies in the cloister.
Please don’t make me try.
I wanted to tell you all of this in person, but I chose not to for two reasons. The first being that if I’m leaving so that you can still have part of this trip—this pilgrimage—to yourself, it hardly makes sense to start a discussion that I know will go on for days and swallow up your time here.
The second reason is that I didn’t want you to feel like you needed to prove to me that you really want to leave the Church by doing something irreversible and rash. You don’t need to prove it to me, Aiden, I know you would leave. I know you would leap off a cliff or swim in gross grotto water if I asked, and so I don’t need proof. All I need, all I’ll ever need, is for you to keep living this life that means so much to you. To keep on as if I’d never come knocking at your cloister door, demanding to put my fingers in every wound you had. I need to know that you are full of all the joy and calm that you’ve earned over the years; that you are living like a saint. Maybe that means there’s hope for the rest of us to become saints too, in our own ways.
Goodbye, Brother Patrick.
I love you like that. I love you like this.
I love you like everything.
