12 KiB
It had been a long trip home, from St John's back to Sawtooth.
I was hardly run out of the campus the moment of my decision. I was given the remainder of the month to wrap up my affairs and attend to the task of packing my meager belongings in order to move out of my room and bus back to Idaho, to Sawtooth. To home.
It was more than enough. My stuff was packed into two file boxes within an hour. After all, all of the furniture in the room belonged to the school. What had I besides clothes and books? Clothes, books, and my rosary.
I carried it with me always, then, my fingers marching through the decades of beads as words tumbled through my mind, spilled from my mouth without a sound. Over the next two weeks, I prayed the Rosary dozens of times. Hundreds of Hail Marys and Our Fathers.
I knew not what drew me to begin this litany of prayer. I strove to pray the Rosary every day, as a rule, but now, I needed that reassurance of faith. I needed some sign --- whether to myself or to those around me I wasn't sure --- that this decision was one of vocations, not of faith.
With my possessions packed away, I had little to do beyond pray and spend as much time in the library as I could before it would no longer be available to me.
"Technically," Borenson had confided when providing me instructions for those last few weeks. "You shouldn't have access to anything but the refectory, the chapel, and your room for the remainder of your time on campus, but I don't think anyone will begrudge you access to your beloved books."
The library and the woods, the quad, the lakes, the sky.
The Saint Bernard was waiting for me, sitting on the stone and cement bench by the statue of St. Kateri Tekakwitha. The dog had rested his shoulders on his knees and clasped his hands, and was looking down between his feet through the opening this had created. Or, well, not looking. Father Borenson was not looking at anything. He had the absent expression of thought or prayer.
I had been making a round of all my favorite spots on this, my last day, and my final stop was here. A statue, a stone bench, a lake. Trees and heavy air.
I stood awkwardly by the statue, unsure of what to do with my advisor --- my old advisor --- present. This had always been a place of solitary engagement for me. Were it anyone else, I would have left and aimed to come back a little later. I still had an hour before I needed to head to the bus station.
"Afternoon, Mr. Kimana."
"Father. Sorry if I disturbed you. I can come back later."
The dog shook his head and leaned back against the bench, patting the spot next to him. "I was waiting for you, actually. I was hoping I'd catch you before you left."
After a moment's hesitation, I accepted the invitation and sat down, paws resting in my lap. Conversing sitting side by side like this was a mixed blessing. I didn't feel obligated to maintain eye contact, which was always a relief, but I was also left with the disconcerting feeling that there was a place I ought to be looking, that it ought to be at what whoever I was speaking with was looking at.
No wonder I wasn't cut out for this.
Borenson was the first to break the silence. "Dee, do you know what discernment is?"
"I'm assuming you mean in regards to figuring out one's calling?"
"Mmhm. Discerning whether you're heading toward married life, ministry, hermitage, whatever." He shook his head and laughed. "Sorry, this is one of those last-day conversations, and it's kind of difficult."
I nodded numbly. This was already wildly outside of my normal interactions with Borenson. Less academic, more informal, emotional.
"We don't really tell our students because we want you to come in feeling devoted, but there's a whole set of guidelines already in place behind the scenes to deal with this. Has been for centuries, really. It used to be, you'd be whisked away before you had the chance to even say goodbye. We'd box up your stuff and send it to you. It was a different church back then.
"Now, we see it more like a process. Discernment is something that takes place over time. You're in your twenties, you're not going to have it all figured out, much as you might sometimes imagine."
I frowned. St. Kateri Tekakwitha, I prayed silently.
Favored child and Lily of the Mohawks, I come to seek your intercession in my present need. I don't know what to do...
"It's a little clumsy, but the analogy I always use is to think of these first few semesters of your degree like dating. You and the Church --- the Church as an institution, not just a faith --- like each other, and want to maybe get closer, but you're going to try things on for size for a bit. See how it works out."
Outwardly, I nodded. "That makes sense. It's not a divorce, just a break-up before it gets serious."
Inwardly, I was doing my best to let go. Let go of this place. Let go of my study. Let go of the idea that I had built up over so long a time of what life would be like.
I admire the virtues which adorned your soul: love of God and neighbor, humility, obedience, patience, purity and the spirit of sacrifice. Help me to imitate your example in my state of life.
"Right," the Saint Bernard nodded. "Just turns out you and the Church get along better as friends than in...well, the metaphor breaks down somewhat here, but you can see how ordination is rather like marriage."
I smiled weakly. "Yeah."
"All this is to say that I think you're doing the right thing, because no one wants a bitter priest. Some folks might think ill of you, but don't worry about them. You've got your path ahead of you still, and God needs saints more than He needs priests."
Through the goodness and mercy of God, Who has blessed you with so many graces which led you to the true faith and to a high degree of holiness, pray to God for me and help me.
I stared at the statue of the coyote. I knew that if I were to try and look at Father Borenson, to engage with this conversation any more directly, I would not be able to keep from crying.
"I'll leave you be, Dee, but before I do, I'm curious. What will you do after this?"
I worked on mastering the lump of emotion swelling in my chest before replying. "I'm going to go home, stay with my parents. Work on the farm for a bit. Then, um..." I swallowed drily in an attempt to sound less hoarse. "Then I think I'm going to transfer to University of Idaho and get my masters in social work."
Borenson perked up, his tail thumping against the concrete and stone of the bench. "A therapist, hmm?"
"Yeah. I really do want to do good in the world, I just...well, perhaps a different kind." I let my shoulders slump. "I can't...I can't lead a congregation, but maybe I can manage something one-on-one."
"Of course," the dog laughed. "I can certainly see you excelling at that."
I smiled gratefully.
Standing up and brushing off his slacks, Borenson offered me his paw. It dwarfed mine, surrounding it in soft pads and softer fur. It made me feel uncouth, coarse, common.
"Mr. Kimana, it's been a pleasure."
I stood as well and turned the helping paw into a shake. "Thank you, Father."
"I wish you the best of luck. You're always welcome to come visit." The dog relinquished his grip, turned to the statue, crossed himself, and walked back toward campus.
Alone again, I turned from the statue and stared out over the lake. One final time, I asked if I was doing the right thing, and one final time, God spoke to me in the gentle lapping of the water at the shore, in the quiet hum of a bee in flight, in the sweet taste of surety in my mouth.
I stretched, crossed myself before the statue of St. Kateri Tekakwitha, brushed my fingertips over her stone paws, and then began to walk back through the campus.
It was a long trip home.
I hate to say that relatively little happened for the rest of our visit, but we did rather front-load our plans. There was the movie, the concert, then I did my hike, and after that, we spent the rest of the visit just kind of...hanging out.
We spent a lot of time reading together. Reading and listening to music. Kay spent a morning putting together a playlist of songs that she knew that we both liked, and we listened our way through that as each of us skimmed through our books --- at least, I skimmed through mine. Kay didn't seem keen on reading through her newly-purchased scores while other music was playing, and I certainly don't begrudge her that. Instead, she raced through a few novels that she had pulled from her bedside table.
We talked, too, of course. Once we had fallen back into the rhythm of being around each other, and once that initial bump of the concert was over, we opened up more. I spent a good amount of time talking to her about a lot of my memories surrounding St John's, and she talked about growing up with parents that were largely perplexed by her and who largely perplexed her in turn.
She freely admitted that she did not have the slightest clue about where I was coming from when it came to the topic of my discernment, and that to an extent, she had no desire to learn, but that she was still pleased to hear me talk through it, just as I promised her that I was pleased to listen to her talk through her music.
I mostly managed to keep my yap shut when she talked about her parents and youth. Something about growing up autistic with autistic parents was outside of my realm of experience, and the desire to dig deeper into that was strong, but she seemed to need to speak her thoughts out loud more than she needed the process of sharing.
It made sense to me, too. After all, that's what I've been doing to a greater or lesser extent with this journaling experiment, and I certainly got plenty out of simply stating aloud my memories of and thoughts on discernment.
Leaving her behind was sad, of course. I wished that I could spend more time with her even just doing nothing, just being normal together, despite also being glad that I was heading home. Sad, yes, but not in the way that I expected, I think.
I will miss her, that goes without saying, and I wish that I had more time to be close to her, but I was was also distraught due to the mess that my emotions were left in after we said goodbye.
Nothing changed between us. Nothing changed, and I am struggling with the competing thoughts of:
- Of course nothing changed. We were friends going into this, we were friends during the visit, and we are friends now that it's over; and
- I wish that I had had the courage to tell her, such that things might have had the possibility of changing.
I am a coward.
We have such a solid basis for our friendship. We share hobbies, our communication styles line up almost perfectly, and we are comfortable in our silences together. We even share tastes in food1, for heaven's sake.
But I'm a coward. I wanted this to be an incredibly meaningful and emotionally fulfilling visit. I wanted to have long, heartfelt conversations about how I felt and I wanted to understand her better than I did before. I wanted to see if there was the possibility for something more.
I am a coward and I am greedy and I am, I'm realizing, a narcissist, and that is why I'm distraught.
I will miss her.
I will miss her scent, even though it still clings to me after that last hug at the bus stop.
I will miss her voice, though I promised to call her once I made it back to my place in one piece.
I will miss her wit and her sarcasm and her intellect, though we will doubtless continue to talk every day.
I'm sad to be leaving her behind, but beyond that, I am sad to see what I have become, what limerence has made me. I am sad that I have been split in half. I am sad that I am less of an entire being when I think of her, and I am sad that I can't help but think of her. I am sad that some part of me has decided that she is just a limerent object rather than a friend, that I am the subject, and that even if the feelings I have for her were real --- for now I'm sure that they aren't --- I am too much of a coward to actually do anything about it.
Limerence, I have read, fades when feelings are either reciprocated or rebuffed, and yet neither happened, so I am back to hoping against hope that they simply fade with time. I don't want them, these feelings. I don't want to feel this way. I don't want to be tearing up while writing about a girl on a steno pad in an uncomfortable bus seat.
I just want my friend.
-
So long as it isn't lent, of course. She requires meat with every meal, she joked at one point, and I laughed, though I am not sure how much innuendo was behind that comment. Innuendo! Look at you, Dee, all grown up, thinking about innuendo. ↩︎