Inspired by the fact that A Wildness of the Heart wound up with a segment in a video essay on xenofiction (starting at about 1:01:00, but do watch the rest), I figured I would post all of the included novella Limerent Object here.
31
All these little memories, all of them are coming back to me, and I'm not sure why. Nothing about this visit in particular ought to dredge them up, right? I mean, Kay and I have only talked passingly about faith, and sure, I didn't attend mass this weekend and am missing it, but there is little to suggest that this have anything to do with the flood of the small things from the past. Is it the lingering sensation of discernment?
Or perhaps it's talking with God. Perhaps it's less Kay than it is the way in which I'm approaching this whole situation. She herself is not bringing these out in me, but I am recapitulating so many of the same patterns I went through during my discernment.
I wrote before about certain embarrassing things sticking in the mind of the one embarrassed. We Catholics, we are so good at that. We're so good at picking the embarrassing things and hanging them up on the wall, admiring them, and then inviting others to share in the embarrassment with us. Our confessors are the witnesses to our shame. All we can hope is that they provide relief, and yet perhaps that is why so many confessions stick within the mind.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been one week since my last confession, and I accuse myself…I accuse…"
Other than the soft sounds of breathing and the barest hint of vulpine beneath the scent-block, nothing made its way from the other side of the screen, familiar even so many years after the fact, even long after I left St John's
“I accuse myself of the sin of doubt."
“You know that doubt is not a sin, my child."
“I guess, but my doubt is in my vocation."
“I see. Do you doubt in God?"
“No, no. Just…I find myself doubting, uh…I find myself doubting my upcoming role in the Church."
“What about the Church do you doubt, if your faith is solid?"
“I can't put my finger on it."
There was a quiet sigh from the other side of the screen.
“I guess my sin is that I am doubting my ability to actually serve God like I'm supposed to."
“What makes you think that?"
I shrugged helplessly. “I don't do well in front of crowds. No matter how much I try to fix that, I just can't. I doubt that I will ever be able to."
“I see."
It was my turn to wait in silence. Eventually, I bowed my head and said, “That is all, Father. For these and all of my sins, I ask forgiveness from God, and penance and absolution from you."
There was a pause, and then, “Alright, I will ask you to say three Our Fathers for doubting the path that God has laid out for you. It could be that you are still discovering this path, but doubt will only hinder you from carrying out His works. However, my son–" The priest rushed to forestall any response, and I remember hearing a smile creeping into his voice. “Outside of your penance, I would also like you to talk to your advisor. As your confessor, I can only offer you spiritual guidance."
I splayed my ears, chagrined, and bowed my head. “Thank you, Father."
With the final go in peace still ringing in my ears, with the tips of my fingers still humming from crossing myself, with the hot flush of embarrassment still pulling at my cheeks, I stepped from the confessional and blinked in the sudden light and space. I took two quick, grounding breaths, and then walked from the chapel.
I do not want to be here. The thought had become a mantra.
Outside, I walked slowly to one of the concrete blocks that served as benches and sat, resting my face in my paws. If I could not see the stars, if I had only concrete and paving stones before me, then if I wanted to pray, I had to block out my sight. It was all too much. I would find myself tracing the paving stones or the catenary arc of the contemporary entrance to St. Francis Abbey if I left them open.
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! Let yours ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications…
I was not ready yet. Not ready for my penitential pater noster. Not ready to go see my advisor. I didn't feel ready for anything.
Most of all, I realized I was not ready to admit to myself that not wanting to be here implied the possible solution of leaving, of not being here. I wasn't ready.
…If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you so that you may be revered…
I didn't even feel ready for this prayer, for this call out to God. What iniquities faced me? I was privileged to be able to attend such a school as this. I was loved by God and the church and loved them in turn. I was lucky to have been born with a mind so expansive, a body so healthy.
Perhaps the iniquities were within. Perhaps it was something about myself, within myself, a core aspect of myself. Perhaps the privilege was undeserved. Just a coyote, right? Just a farmer, right? And yet here I was, languishing at a renowned seminary.
…I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in His word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch the morning, more than those who watch the morning.
And so I waited.
I wished it were night. I wished I could sit in the quad and look up at the stars, or down at the grass and try to differentiate the shades of green, there in the dark where color eluded me, to find in that liminal state some sensation of the Lord.
At least I could get up from where I was and away from this edifice of concrete and glass. It was, I had been promised, beautiful in its own way. But behind the Abbey, toward the lake, a small path wound through the woods, and there, between the trees and beside the water, stood the statue of St. Kateri Tekakwitha, the only canonized coyote I'd ever come across, and the saint most venerated by my father back home.
…O Israel, hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is great power to redeem…
I was not the farmer my family was, had few enough ties to her patronage of ecology and environmentalism, but in her I saw at least a face like my own. In her, I saw something of a people I could belong to, though she was from far to the east of my home in Idaho.
Home.
Home was back in Sawtooth, for Saint John's would never truly be my home, and that in itself was telling.
…It is He who will redeem Israel from all its iniquities.
Redeem Israel.
Israel, who struggled with God.
I envied, as I often did, the comment I had heard of the Jewish tradition about that eternal argument about who God was, what He meant, in which God was an active participant. Perhaps here, I could wrestle with Him. Tumble with my faith. Get all scuffed up.
But Catholicism only offered him so much leeway, and this school even less.
“I don't want to be here," I confessed to the statue. I remember that. I remember the kindness in the stone, in her smile. I confessed, then sighed, sat at her feet, and began my penance.
32
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 strive to pray the rosary every day, as a rule, but then, I needed that reassurance of faith. I needed some outward 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 elbows 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. 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. I've been looking at maybe 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.
33
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 am certainly getting 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 food 1, 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 crying while writing about a girl on a steno pad in an uncomfortable bus seat.
_____
1 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.
34
I miss my friend.
I miss Kay, yes. I miss being with her, but I miss her as a friend. I miss having her be someone I can turn to. I miss having her in my life with none of these dramatic feelings pinned to her, feelings I have no way of removing.
I'm tired and I'm anxious and I'm tired of being anxious.
I miss my friend.
35
When I look back at some of the entries from during and immediately after my trip, they all sound so bleak. They make it sound like I did not enjoy it, when I clearly did. I focus a lot on my time spent away from Kay. I focus a lot on memories. I focus a lot on that yearning tugging at my chest whenever I was around her.
And honestly, I don't think that's fair to what actually happened. I did enjoy my time around her. I enjoyed it immensely. When we were walking, when we were just ceaselessly rambling at each other about the things we find fascinating, when we went out to lunch, it was all this really delightful mix of nostalgia and connection that went beyond just the desire for anything more. I said in a previous entry that, if limerence is an unwanted emotional attraction, maybe all I really want to do with/for Kay is be the best friend to her that I possibly can. I want to make her happy, and that, in turn, will make me happy as well.
I put that to work when I was with her. We went out to coffee several times at that café near my rented room, and spent a while just talking. We even went for a hike together and, though it lacked the spiritual savor of my other hike in the Reserve, it was still a meaningful experience for me.
And yet, I didn't write about those times, or touched on them only briefly.
I look back through my entries from the visit and wonder why it is that I wrote only about yearning, when I was writing about Kay. I apparently had a hard time putting down the quotidian, all the just plain hanging out that we did together, and instead focused on the burning inside me that craved more than that. It was a form of catastrophizing.
That's not fair to her, that's not fair to me, and that's not fair to the truth of what it is that I think I would actually get out of a relationship with her.
It was that last part that got me me thinking and reading, and I came across an idea that the sheer intensity of limerence had obscured, which is that, above all else, one's partner should be one's best friend, someone who you know will be there with you, share your moments with you. Someone you love and who loves you back, of course, but beyond that, someone who is a part of your life that goes beyond just base-level friendship and up into best friends territory, and beyond.
I think that, right now, I would call Kay my best friend. Unsurprising, of course, given how few friends I have outside of my friendship with her. I am cordial with folks from work and have gotten lunch with several, and there are quite a few folks from church that I have spent time with outside of that context, but, while I care about them, I don't care about them to nearly the same extent that I care about Kay.
I read back through all of those entries and, while I don't wish to put words into her mouth, I sense in her many of the same thoughts. She talked about how few people she keeps up with from Sawtooth, and she mentions having picked up the habit of apologizing to others for talking in the same, excited way that she talks with me, and in that, I see best-friendship.
And if I put those together, if I think of it this way and add that romantic devotion to what is otherwise a friendly devotion, if I turn philia into eros, then is that not a deepening of that friendship? Is that not moving forward? Is that not progress?
I sound so close to giving up, in those entries. I sound like someone who is struggling with their feelings rather than the mechanics of the relationship (though I do note that Kay brings up the mechanical point of our differences in approach to religion, to put it charitably).
I am not one to unconditionally say that all progress is good, but much of it is, and honestly, at this point, I struggle to see the ways in which progressing our relationship would be a negative.
So, enough equivocation. I think it's time to tell her. To ask her. To, if nothing else, find out where we stand and see what futures lay ahead of us.