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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.

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36

Over the last few days, I have been sending Kay a few emails. I am ashamed to admit that this is an intentional aspect of some grander plan. One could say that it is to get her re-accustomed to getting emails from me, though this is a somewhat less than charitable way of looking at it.

In reality, it is a way for me to psych myself up for sending what I hope to be the email wherein I discuss my feelings for her. It's less that she needs some sort of preparation for simply receiving an email, and more that I need to get myself ready to actually click the button that sends it.

I am clearly struggling with this process if I am feeling the need to not only psych myself up to email someone but also journal about the process of psyching myself up.

I am, as always, a coward. That I even need to do this over email is proof enough of that.

Anyway, here is what I am thinking that I will send her tomorrow — it is getting late today and I want to be awake for the whole process.

Kay

If you had told me, over the years that we have known each other, that I would be writing to you like this, I wouldn't have believed you. It's a strange enough act on its own, sending you an email, but to do so like this, to send something like this, is so strange as to border on the ludicrous.

We've known each other for a good, what, five years now? And have been friends for a good chunk of that time. For some reason, we just kind of click when we really get going talking to each other, sharing whatever thing we're interested in at the time. We share a lot of the same idiosyncrasies, verbal habits, and even coping mechanisms.

Lately, I have noticed something of a change in myself. I've always enjoyed your company, of course, but I have noticed that my feelings of friendship are starting to take on a romantic bent.

I'm sure that I could go on, as you know I am prone to doing, but that would only muddy the point. Needless to say, I like you Kay, and am starting to admit to myself that I am liking you more as time goes by. And though I've been hesitant to put it in such words even to myself, I think I'm falling in love with you.

I don't know how to do this. I am a consummately awkward person by my own admission, and I've never had to admit that I've started to feel romantic toward someone before. Perhaps that's weird. Normal people, I suspect, have told several people that they're in love by the time that they're nearing thirty, but, well, it has just never been on my radar.

I feel compelled to say that you are under no obligation to return these feelings toward me. If you don't feel the same way, that's completely fine, and I hope that this will not negatively impact your view of me as a friend. This is a feeling I've had toward you, but it need not be the only feeling I have.

But, on the chance that this is a mutual feeling between us, I would like to deepen our relationship beyond friendship. As stated, I have no idea how to do this, so I suppose I'm asking you out ?

Again, no worries if not! I am simply happy to have you as my friend.

Best,

Dee

I have slaved over these words so long that I think I nearly have the letter memorized. It's silly, in a way, to put this much energy into something, but this entire process has been silly. It's been silly since I caught myself having dreams about her, and before even that, when I started this whole journal process.

But I am nothing if not deliberate, and this feels like the proper way to undertake a discernment, though I find that term most often in a religious context. I am digging deep into all of my thoughts, stripping away the extraneous ones, and then boiling the remainder down into an admission. An admission to myself, but also one that I can send to Kay.

I will think on it and pray on it for one more night before sending it, but honestly, of all of the decisions that I've made around this entire debacle, if it can be called that, this one feels the most freeing. It feels like me opening a little bit of space for myself.

It was all well and good for me to reduce my feelings to trying to be the best friend I could be for her ¹, and one ought to keep in mind the selfless in one's life, but, well, one cannot be a truly good friend while withholding information. I cannot, at least. I can't be a good friend while continuing to tear myself up inside over this. I called myself a narcissist before in these pages, but, while perhaps some of my thoughts have been narcissistic, that is far to strong a word than required for simply striving for happiness.

I will think, I will pray, and then I will click “send".

_____

¹ Something I aim to do for her regardless.

37

As promised, I spent this morning thinking and praying on the letter, and in true Dee form, this involved getting a ride to a trail head up by the foothills and going for a walk.

My mind was too busy and unsettled to do much other than attempt to sort feelings into differently labeled and sized boxes. I ran through an internal checklist of all the things that had happened leading up to this decision, all the steps along the path of discernment. I ticked them off one by one as I filed them on various shelves, then went back through and erased all of the check marks and filed them on different shelves. It was exhausting, being unable to let go of a thought, like a cut on the inside of one's muzzle or a zit at the base of a whisker, something you can't help but poke and prod at ceaselessly in the hopes that maybe something will help.

Eventually, I simply got too tired to continue thinking like that. I was panting by now, the cool air of the foothills drawing heat from me and leaving my tongue dry and lolling. I realized that I had nearly jogged up the hill from the trail head, and had made it much further than I had intended while so preoccupied.

I considered heading back into town before it got too hot out, but instead, I found a rock off to the side of the trail that wasn't too dusty, and I sat down and looked out over what bits of Sawtooth I could see over the first real hill outside of town.

Scraps of buildings peeked out from the very south edge of downtown, then a mess of neighborhoods swept down south, affluence and age defined block by block. Out behind town toward the highway, the houses faded and warehouses sprouted in their place. Warehouses and workshops and anonymous, low-slung office buildings that doubtless housed call centers or data entry facilities or hyperspecific contractors.

And then beyond out into the scattered fields and grazing land. What green there was outside those fields was already fading into brown, and in the air the brown was echoed in a haze of dust or what smog dared collect above the town.

I wish that I could say that I talked with God then, like I have so many other times in this narrative. I wish I could tell you that he spoke to me in the slow dissolution of town into not-town. I wish I could say that I found beauty even in the right angles that nature so abhors, that even industry spoke to a sort of majesty all its own.

He didn't, though. He was silent. There was no surety to be had, there was no gentle nudges by that still, small voice this way or that.

I prayed the rosary instead, counting decades of Hail Marys and Our Fathers on beads worn smooth.

I couldn't even form a request, at that point. I couldn't talk to God, I couldn't come up with the words, all I could do was sit with myself and my thoughts and my rosary and a pulse racing at the tension of limerence within me, at the thought of all I could possibly have in my future.

I sat on that rock until I started to bake in the sun, then started to head back down the trail where I came. It had grown far too hot and I had to beg water off a better prepared mountain lion about halfway through my hike back to the trail head just to keep my lips and tongue wet as I puffed and panted.

At the lot, I called for another GetThere care to take me back home, back to my air-conditioned apartment where I could rehydrate and hem and haw until eventually, hopefully, maybe, I could finally hit send on that email and release this overwhelming tension within.

38

7:24 PM Dee> Been thinking.

7:26 PM Dee> We still talk a lot, and I really like that. For having only had a little bit of time together at UI, it's nice that we've been able to keep up with each other.

7:26 PM Kay> Yeah?

7:26 PM Kay> I mean, I like it too.

7:27 PM Kay> I only talk to you and like two classmates from that time, and one only because he's also up here in Boise.

7:27 PM Dee> Yeah.

7:28 PM Dee> So I don't know if this is weird or not. It's not something I've ever done or

7:28 PM Kay> ?

7:31 PM Dee> Not something I've ever done or really felt, but I think I really like you.

7:31 PM Dee> Know I really like you.

7:31 PM Dee> And goodness knows I have no idea what to do about it.

7:31 PM Dee> It's taken me weeks to even get to the point where I could say that.

7:32 PM Kay> Huh…

7:33 PM Dee> ???

7:34 PM Kay> I like you too, but I'm not sure if it's in the same way?

7:34 PM Kay> Assuming you mean romantically.

7:34 PM Dee> Yes.

7:35 PM Kay> Yeah, see.

7:35 PM Kay> I don't know.

7:35 PM Dee> I don't either, I guess.

7:37 PM Kay> I'm really not sure how to take this conversation haha

7:40 PM Kay> I hope that's not

7:40 PM Kay> I don't know

7:40 PM Kay> Painful?

7:45 PM Dee> Well.

7:45 PM Kay> Yeah, sorry…

7:45 PM Dee> No no, I mean

7:45 PM Dee> Well, it is, but that's not quite where I was going, hah.

7:46 PM Kay> Sorry. I'll let you type.

7:50 PM Dee> I don't really know what I wanted out of this conversation, to be honest. I wasn't even intending for it to be a conversation, at least right off the bat. I had a whole email written up that I was going to send you, to be perfectly nerdy about it.

7:54 PM Dee> Feelings like this aren't logical. At least, they don't feel logical So I think I just wanted to say that because I don't know what to do with all of them. They just boil up within me and I just sit there and feel weird and bad but also kind of good at the same time. I just started falling for you, and kept it to myself because it felt like such an imposition to admit that to you.

7:54 PM Dee> And I should add

7:55 PM Dee> The goal is specifically NOT to do that. It wasn't to try and rope you into something you don't want to do, and I don't want to make it sound like I am trying to do so now.

7:55 PM Dee> Guilt you into it or whatever.

7:56 PM Dee> But I did want to talk about it and get it off my chest.

7:57 PM Dee> And I guess that's it.

7:57 PM Kay> Alright.

7:58 PM Kay> I mean, I don't think you could guilt the wings off a fly, Dee.

7:58 PM Kay> The whole Catholic thing is guilting yourself, right?

7:59 PM Dee> That's a bit of an uncharitable way to put it.

7:59 PM Kay> Sorry. You know I don't understand it.

7:59 PM Dee> Yeah.

8:00 PM Kay> And that's maybe part of it.

8:00 PM Dee> How so?

8:01 PM Kay> How would you feel being in a relationship with someone who doesn't believe the same stuff?

8:01 PM Kay> Doesn't believe ANY of it, I mean.

8:01 PM Kay> I'm not going to knock it or anything, but I'm not going to try it, either.

8:02 PM Kay> I'm sorry.

8:02 PM Dee> Hah.

8:02 PM Dee> Sorry, that came out weird?

8:06 PM Dee> Seriously, though, I really don't know. This whole thing, this whole crush or whatever it is, I don't know what the end goal of it is. It's limerence, it's something that's happening to me, and I don't know what to do about it. It's this enormous feeling and you're the limerent object, and I hate that my brain is doing it.

8:07 PM Dee> And at the same time, I really do like you, and that is something I am happy to accommodate even in the context of our friendship.

8:07 PM Dee> Because above all else, I'm simply happy to have you as my friend.

8:07 PM Kay> Same!

8:09 PM Dee> And even if a relationship isn't in our future, that's totally okay.

8:10 PM Kay> Thanks Dee <3

8:10 PM Kay> I don't know, it's weird.

8:11 PM Kay> I kind of suspected, now that I think back on it?

8:11 PM Kay> Not like you were being a weirdo.

8:11 PM Kay> Or any more than usual ????

8:13 PM Kay> Just little things about how you acted when I was over. Nothing bad, just you had a certain distance about you, like you were being extra careful about something or guarding something. Like, every time you came over to my place and wound up sitting in my bed or something, you'd get all quiet.

8:13 PM Kay> I realize after the fact that that was probably super weird for you. Sorry about that.

8:14 PM Dee> Oh, are you saying I was more awkward than usual? Shock and surprise!

8:14 PM Kay> Haha

8:17 PM Dee> It was weird, but please don't put that on you. I just…yeah, I was fighting with my emotions at the time, and huddling on your bed where literally all I could smell was you and with you being the sole focus of my attention, it was…well.

8:18 PM Dee> Intense, I guess.

8:18 PM Kay> I bet.

8:18 PM Kay> Still, I'm sorry, Dee.

8:19 PM Kay> I won't say my 'no' is absolute and forever, I can't predict that, but it is a 'no' for now.

8:19 PM Dee> Thanks, Kay.

8:20 PM Dee> For being so open about it, I mean.

8:20 PM Dee> And honest, I guess.

8:21 PM Dee> Uh…and to continue being awkward for at least a moment longer, are you okay remaining friends?

8:21 PM Kay> Dee I swear to god

8:22 PM Kay> If you did anything to make me not want to be your friend any longer a) you would know it because I would kick your ass and b) I'd go fucking nuts because I wasn't kidding about you being just about the only friend I have that I can talk to.

8:22 PM Kay> We're friends, okay? If a friendship can't take a challenge, what even is it, then? :P

8:23 PM Dee> Haha. Well, good. I'm not keen on getting my ass kicked, and ditto. I'd rather have my nails pulled out that lose you as a friend.

8:23 PM Kay> Gross

8:23 PM Kay> ????

8:25 PM Dee> It feels surprisingly good to get that out.

8:25 PM Kay> Even if it isn't the outcome you wanted?

8:26 PM Dee> It's weird.

8:27 PM Dee> I'm not sure what outcome it is that I really wanted.

8:29 PM Dee> I mean, not gonna lie, if we'd wound up going out or whatever, that would've been nice! But I don't think that was ACTUALLY my goal. I think I really just wanted to get it off my chest. I wanted to not be holding it in and feeling like an idiot any longer.

8:29 PM Kay> I bet!

8:30 PM Kay> How long has it been, anyway?

8:31 PM Kay> Shit. If you don't mind me asking, that is. I don't want to draw it out if this is just continuing to hurt you or anything ????

8:32 PM Dee> No, it's okay! It's made me a weird, giggly mess for some reason because apparently I'm still twelve, admitting that I have a crush, but it's good to talk about.

8:32 PM Dee> Way better than an email would have been, yikes.

8:32 PM Dee> But it's been about six months? A bit longer?

8:33 PM Kay> Can I just say that you writing up a whole-ass email to tell me that you like me is the most Dee possible thing that I can think of?

8:33 PM Dee> Listen.

8:33 PM Dee> I set up an archetype for myself and have no choice but to live up to it.

8:33 PM Kay> Nerd

8:35 PM Kay> What was even in the email?

8:35 PM Dee> I still have it in drafts. Want me to just send it?

8:35 PM Kay> Sure

8:43 PM Kay> Oh Dee

8:43 PM Kay> This is incredibly sweet, jesus

8:43 PM Kay> fuck haha

8:43 PM Kay> got me all sniffly

8:44 PM Kay> You're still a total nerd

8:45 PM Kay> But whoever you wind up with is gonna be the luckiest gal out there

8:45 PM Kay> Man, I'm sorry

8:46 PM Dee> ??

8:47 PM Kay> I feel like I'm teasing you by saying that ????

8:47 PM Dee> I don't feel teased.

8:48 PM Dee> A bit…bashful, maybe?

8:48 PM Dee> And I'm not going to lie that hearing that makes me a little bit hopeful for the future, but I stand by what I said that I'm alright with your answer, and am happy to have you as a friend.

8:49 PM Kay> Uh

8:49 PM Kay> Yeah, I don't know

8:49 PM Kay> Let's talk about it in the future sometime, then? Because yeah, like

8:50 PM Kay> Maybe we could make it work?

8:51 PM Kay> But just not right now

8:51 PM Kay> I can picture it in my mind, and you're cute and sweet and we have fun, but I guess I just can't say yes right now.

8:52 PM Dee> For the future, then.

8:52 PM Dee> For now, I'm gonna go order some food. Not to put an artificial stopper in this, but maybe we can just chill with a movie or something after?

8:53 PM Kay> Yeah, sounds good ???? Sci-fi bullshit?

8:53 PM Dee> Oh, definitely sci-fi bullshit.

39

All of my work on emotional literacy is failing me now. It was largely failing me then, as well. I am doing my best to process the conversation that we had here, but I am in a state of, I suppose, numbness, and that numbness is taking up the same amount of space that the limerence did before. It is overwhelming in its nullity, and there is nothing, it seems, that I can do to shake it. I cannot transmute it into something more positive.

But that said, the nullity is not negative. It is not a lack of any necessity. It is a lack, instead, of the too-full feeling of limerence that had once taken up a full half of my entire being.

That space, I imagine, will contract. I will slowly retract that distension back into myself. Not the self I used to be, but something new and changed, for after so long of having that bloat, a permanent mark has been left. I am changed. I am different.

Better? I hope so, but it is yet to be seen.

For the point of my subconscious strain has faded, and only the habit of doing so remains. Where before I would dream of getting the chance to hold Kay's hand or to lay in bed next to her or, and let's not mince words here as this is what journals are for, make love, I now dream about what that life would have looked like in greater clarity. Where before I would construct a counterfactual universe in which we lived a perfect life, in which her fur was as soft as it was in my dreams, I now construct counterfactual universes in which we got together and it was specifically not perfect, and I run down a list of all of the things that might have hindered perfection. Religion, sure, but what about that envy I felt at the concert? Was that a one-time thing? Would that have carried over? Would I be a possessive partner, or would that have relaxed? And so I imagine both.

I imagine us a few years down the line, sharing an apartment. I imagine which of us would have to move. Would I move my practice to Boise? Would she be content, as a musician, to live out here in Sawtooth? We have a good enough music program at the university that she got her bachelors out here, but that presupposes the fact that she might want to teach. Would we even stay in Idaho?

And how would us living together look, anyway? I have my little one-bedroom apartment that suits me in particular due to its solitude. It faces a ruddy creek that has been gussied up into something grander through landscaping and a meandering path. I like my solitude, but living together means having someone constantly in your space. Where would I get that solitude?

I have my apartment set up with a combination library/den/home office and my bedroom, while Kay has her computer in her bedroom which is also her living room which is also, for the most part, her kitchen. Where would she put her computer, and where would I put mine? Would we share a library? I imagine so; in my brighter imaginings, I picture how we might have looked, sitting on a couch by our combined bookshelves, each reading our own thing.

But the problem remains. We would have to get a two-bedroom apartment, at the very least, so that we could have separate office spaces, separate areas of privacy. An office and a shared bedroom? Do we split the office with some kind of divider? Do I keep my office in the living room?

And still, I picture it working. I picture us sharing a bed. I picture us parceling out chores. I picture us waiting for the other to finish using the bathroom and getting a little disgusted by lingering scents. I picture us getting tired of simple pasta with chicken or whatever, and deciding to learn how to cook something better because eating out is getting expensive.

And sure, I picture the sex. I have no idea whether Kay is a virgin, and don't particularly care, I think, but I am, and instead of fantasizing about perfect lovemaking, I picture us struggling to get our moods aligned, and I picture the process of at least me learning how to be intimate, and potentially the both of us.

A wedding? Would that be in our future? And if so, what does that look like? Do we have a long and occasionally heated process of discernment to decide whether or not she is okay with a Catholic wedding?

And oh yes, the church. Do we find our own unique way to agree to disagree? I have little enough iconography in my place, but I do have my mother's crucifix and my father's painting of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha on my walls, and I would not be comfortable removing either. I pray the rosary regularly. I attend mass every weekend, if possible. These are the facts of my life, and until confronted with these imaginings, I had not realized that they are all visible. Kay would be confronted with all of them on a daily basis.

And I would be confronted with her atheism. On the surface, I can see that being acceptable to me, and none of my immediate family is alive to question whether or not it is appropriate for me to marry outside the church, so I do not have to rely on approval.

I can see it being acceptable, except for the fact that a core aspect of my life is missing from hers. Me, Dee, the one who was on track to be Father Kimana. Visible or not, that is a divide that can only be bridged and never filled.

Oh, and should we have children, would they be raised Catholic? Would they be baptized? Would they attend mass and their mother not?

I can see it being acceptable, but I can also see it being an awful lot of work for the both of us.

Where are the compromises? Where are the fights? Where are we twenty, thirty, forty years down the line? Do we make it twenty, thirty, forty years? Are we so fit for each other that we can manage that?

Before, when limerence filled me to overflowing, I imagined in dreamy yeses and delicate physicality. Now that that has faded and left something else in its place, I imagine in questions. I imagine in what-ifs and is-it-actuallys.

In the end, though, I hope that this is better. More, I believe that it is better, this numbness that has taken its place. I believe it must be, because if there is one sensation that I can liken to this numbness, these imaginings, these feelings and emotions, it is healing.

Trite? Sure, but limerence was an unwieldy mass that laid claim to me, and, even at its best, I was opposed to that claim. I am healing from the wounds that it left when it dug its claws into me, when it was removed and left that hole where once it was.

I am free of it, I am healing, and all these imaginings and suppositions boil down to me desiring only that, should we wind up deciding some day down the line to get together, that we come across that jointly, consensually, honestly, syntonically, uninfluenced by that wildness of the heart, as past-Dee put it.

40

I closed my steno pad after the most recent entry, fully intending that that would be the last entry that I would write. The discernment, after all, was complete, even if only for a little while, and I no longer needed to puzzle it out on paper.

“That's bullshit and you know it," Jeremy laughed when I told him this fact.

I felt my ears redden. “You think I'll keep writing about it?"

“Of course I do, Dee. It's just how you work. I think you reached a milestone with this, and I'm honestly proud of you. You were always courageous, you know. You can think of it like a hill, you had to push and push and push, and you kept doing so even if you didn't really know you were. Then you hit the tipping point at the top of the hill and that courage came through and did its job."

I nodded and mumbled a thanks.

“So, yes, you reached a milestone, but the work isn't over, I bet. Are you ready to just drop back into your old friendship with Kay?"

After a moment's thought, I shook my head. “No. It's changed things plenty. The last few days feel like a renegotiation of boundaries. It feels like we're both being really careful around the other."

“Right," he said. “I imagine you'll have to learn how to be friends again, and that that friendship will look different."

“You think I should keep journaling on it, then?"

“I don't think you have a choice, bud," he laughed. “The stuff you sent me was you doing your best to process all of this, and I could see the work taking place. You just admitted the work will continue, so, yeah, keep it up. And anyway, you talk about your advisor saying that he would have been concerned if you were losing your faith, and Kay says that you writing her an email to tell her how you feel is the most you thing ever. I think you're basically stuck journaling."

It was my turn to laugh. “Right, right, okay. I'll keep it up, then."

“And hey, you can pull a lot of your thoughts on discernment and such out into a book or hell, clean these up and turn them into a memoir. It's not like this stuff is useful to only you."

That's been lingering with me, but I remain unsure. I could, yes, and maybe it would provide some sort of entertainment, but that would mean going through and editing everything up ¹. Even just the process of transferring notes from paper to computer so that I could email them to Jeremy had been rough enough, being confronted by that Dee of a few months back, struggling with the most basic language of actually liking someone.

I do agree with the first point that Jeremy made, though. I really ought to keep journaling. It's good for me, and I don't think I could ever really stop, after going through this.

So, yes. The work continues.

Kay broached the subject of stopping by UI Sawtooth for a concert some day and spending a bit of time together. The doors to friendship remain open, and I don't imagine that it will be intolerably awkward, but it will still present challenges. Would hugging be too awkward? Should we spend the whole trip together much like we did the last one?

As the next step of my spiritual discernment, I have reached out to the parish priest about offering free mental health counseling to less fortunate members of the congregation or those who stop by the mission the church runs in town and he is going to set up a meeting with the bishop of the diocese to see if there's space for such in a church-sanctioned context. I think that I would be happy enough to volunteer such on my own. It's not the spiritual counseling that I had once planned on after my undergrad, but it is something far more in my area of expertise and comfort zone.

All these things are part of the work, though. Work is part of life, and life goes on. I still see my clients. I still watch videos and talk about my days with Kay. I still go to mass. I still think about the past year when I write. I still get rides out to the edge of Sawtooth or over to a trail head and walk until my feet ache and I am gasping in the pine-scented, dusty air.

And still I talk with God.

_____

¹ I already felt compelled to add all of these footnotes, after all.

Fin.

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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.

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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.

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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.

---

26

When I was in school back at Saint John's, I was met with a sudden cessation of chores. I had things to do, to be sure. Things that were repetitive and at times menial, but when you grow up on a farm, the concept of 'chore' goes well beyond simple repetitive, menial task. My callouses have long faded, but during my first months there in Minnesota, they still scraped against my notes and the pages of books every time I interacted with them.

Even when I was getting my undergrad at UI, I was regularly back at home and working. I spent the requisite first year in the dormitories, but went home every weekend to help my parents out. Summer was as full of work as it had ever been growing up, and when my second year rolled around, I stayed living at home, preferring the daily commute — long though it was — to central Sawtooth from the farm out past the outskirts.

My parents were pleased, of course. Help was help, and they certainly loved me.

In Minnesota, though, there was no farming. No hauling, no driving, no commute beyond the walk from my simple apartment just off campus to the campus itself. I quickly developed a walking habit to at least feel some of that same energy expenditure as I had back home.

However, there is a difference of mindset between all the tasks involved in growing soybeans and that of walking. Those chores before may have been mindless, but they required an active enough focus so that one didn't mess up whatever it was one was supposed to be doing. It was goal oriented in a way that walking was not, and the undirectedness of action with walking became a form of prayer.

Well, not prayer, per se, but contemplation. It was something more and less than prayer. Sometimes I might begin with prayer, but before long, words would leave me, and I would be left with the sights and sounds, the presence of God. It was beyond prayer. It was beyond meditation.

I'd walk through the campus at night. I'd walk around the Arboretum. I'd walk along the shore of the lake to the smaller chapel, so like the parish back home, so unassuming next to the wildly flamboyant abbey on campus.

And while I'd walk, I'd talk to God. Not pray to Him, not meditate on His perfection. I'd send my mind soaring out over the reeds and the water and taste him on the sickly-sweet scent of honeysuckles. I'd tramp along the wooden walkway in the Arboretum and hear him in the thrum of the boards beneath my feet.

He would be in the bitter, biting cold of February, lingering on the fog of my breath.

He would be in the muddy slog of spring, the indecision of seasons a lazy finger on the scale.

He would be in the way the Minnesota night hung heavy around me, the air as loath to relinquish the heat of day as the year was to give in to autumn. Nearly eleven, the long hours of evening managing to pull away some of the warmth, and He would be in the breath of cooler air coming off the lake. Mosquitoes drifting lazily beneath the trees, and He would be in even that high whine.

Sawtooth has nothing on that.

Here, I will occasionally take a bus or get a ride to the edge of town and walk and hunt for that same quietude that I felt before. I have come close a few times. I came close when I got out past the highway and into the farm lands and walked along the narrow shoulder of the road, watching the sky dip from blue down through salmon to purple, with that brief stop at red that bathed the soy and wheat fields in light like wine. At that moment, I lost all thought, lost all direction, lost all action and gave myself up to the contemplation.

For a scant few minutes, I was able to touch on that space once more and it was there that I was able to talk with God once again.

I did not ask Him for anything — intercession is for the saints.

I did not tell Him anything — He knows all I could ever possibly tell Him.

I do not share the same relationship with the Trinity that protestants do, but at that moments, I suppose I felt some of what they do with their personal relationship with God, with their idea that He dwells within them in some intimate, immediate way.

He passed through me, suffused me with His light like wine, and in that moment, knew me completely, and I could gaze on Him in faith, and I could sit in that silent love.

I stood a while in the gloaming, and as that moment left me, I let it go. What could I possibly do to hold onto God? What could a sinner like me do? How could I possibly hope to ask Him to stay with me? Me, a coyote, a farmer's son, a scraggly beast who failed to live up to his own dreams of pastoral life.

I walked home. No bus, no ride. I walked until the pads on my feet bled.

27

I had to stop, yesterday. I had to stop writing.

I don't know why that memory left me in tears, paws shaking too much to write. I don't even know why I decided to commit that memory to this journal. I started this project with the goal of trying to suss out my thoughts and feelings surrounding Kay, and yet I keep writing about this. I keep writing about God or the Church or leaving Saint John's. I know that I said I would, yes, but it still somehow feels like a trespass.

I walked around the block afterward, trying to calm down, breathe deeply, be present. I did all the things I tell my patients to do when they panic, and I suppose some of it worked. I was at least able to look at the ground, look at the sky, look at the grass and trees and buildings and not feel this unnamed emotion.

If I had any doubt that Jeremy was right in suggesting journaling, I think it has been well and truly dashed by now.

This feeling, then. It is somewhere between shame and guilt. It has that bitter-savory flavor to it. It makes my fur feel clumped and matted. Why have I changed so much since leaving Saint John's that I cannot talk with God as I used to? I do not feel forsaken by Him, I really don't. So why do I feel so much…less in His sight than I did before?

Today, though, I am going for a hike. Kay has a meeting or something at the university ¹, so I am taking advantage of her absence to get a bit of walking in by myself, here in a new setting.

_____

¹ And we always knew that it would not be just constant time together when we planned that.

28

It turns out that the house I'm staying in isn't far from a patch of wilderness. I do not know why it is called the Military Reserve, but I am not going to turn down the chance at walking away from the city. Boise is so much taller, so much louder than Sawtooth, I feel hemmed in here.

It wasn't quite close enough to walk, but at least there's ride shares.

It's strange how easily I fell back into old habits. Perhaps it was the writing I did last night, or perhaps it's the need to get away that drove me up into the hills, out on a walk, out to blister my feet and talk with God. It didn't seem to matter how unfamiliar the trail was. I just started walking through that scrub and brush, through all that brown and all that air, and not five minutes in did I feel my mind empty, as always it seemed to. The scrub around me, buffalo grass and sage and yarrow and bitter cherry, gained depth and clarity, stalks and crenelations arching up to me, up to God, assuming that is where the heavens live. The colors called out to me. The scents stung my nose, even the five-and-some feet up from my point of view. Bitter, aspirinic whiffs of yarrow. Stale shortcake grasses. Ungreen, but not unalive. The taste of dust lingering on my tongue, not enough to be gritty but enough to remind me that the earth was the earth and that I was separate from that. The air, the air itself pushed its way nosily through my fur, a breeze from the west, toppling down off the hills. The air and the hard-packed dirt of the trail beneath my feet knocking vibrations up through my shins. Soft padding, soft crunching, soft rustling; wind in fur, air wandering between tussocks; breathing slowing, calming. Rhythms on the scale from footsteps to seasons.

Even writing this, even sitting on a fence rail at the trail head, I can feel it still.

And through it all, the Lord. Through each and every step, dancing along every brittle stem and blade of grass, surrounding every grain of dust in a blanket of the utmost attention. His voice traveled along the breeze, His breath was the bitter yarrow and shortcake grass. And all of it I could feel and all of it I could hear and all of it washed over and through me and I bathed in it. “His light like wine", I wrote yesterday, and that wine filled me today, and I can still taste it.

There are no conclusions from God. There are no favors that I, a servant, could possibly ask of him. What would He do? Would He tell me what to say to Kay? All He has for me is grace and forgiveness. That is so much more than any other individual could ever offer me.

All the same, I listened for hope, for guidance, for the discernment than hasn't left me since I left St John's.

To ask that grace, that breath, that light like wine what it is to do is the wrong question. To ask from Him the worldly answers is to misunderstand the scope of things.

To say that He has no plan for me, no path, however, isn't correct either. He does, and that's why I talk with Him. It's perhaps less than Catholic of me, or at least of a more mystical bent than ought to be expected of me. I'm no Beghard, no Eckhart.

All I know is that sometimes words fail me, and that the Ground does not.

I don't know if that path leads toward Kay. I just can't see that far ahead on it. I don't know if it leads me any further into the Church. That's around some corner I can't comprehend. I don't know anything, it seems, but I needed this. I needed time with myself. I needed this walking conversation, this inside-out hesychasm. I needed out of Boise and away from Kay, away from the scent of her, away from the way she presses against my chest from the inside. I need

29

I know that I stopped writing of a sudden yesterday. I ran out of words, and didn't know what it was that I needed to say that I needed. I just sat for a while, closed my notebook, grabbed another ride back to town, and sat at that coffee shop I visited a few days ago, drinking an ice tea and looking at nothing, and then I went back to my room and sat on my bed and read for a bit. I'll meet up with Kay tonight, I'm sure.

I got my notebook out to see if I could finish what I started, but I couldn't. It's just not there anymore.

Instead, I just dived back into memories. Of that night, I remember first of all the way I cupped my fingers over the bridge of my muzzle and pulled down gently while pushing my snout up. The isometric stretch served to highlight every bit of tension within my neck, and as I held the pressure, I closed my eyes, counting the knotted muscles. Pressed, pushed, and held until I could feel the lactic acid burn deep in the tissue, and then released. With my targets thus marked, I ducked my muzzle down and slid my paws back, fingers kneading along sore spots.

Not for the first time, I wished that I could simply disappear within the written word. Wished that I could relinquish the very idea of physical sensation and surround myself in successive layers of scripture, commentaries, notes. Wished, most of all, that I could wrap myself in the warmth of my faith.

If, at the end of time, faith and hope are to fade, there would be a final sense of completion, but until then, my faith was a comfort.

I shook my head to try to clear the clinging rumination, closing the book of Pauline commentaries and the notebook that I had been attacking with a highlighter and pen.

Standing from my rickety chair, I stretched toward the ceiling, claws brushing up against the off-white-towards-gray paint momentarily before I leaned to the side to loosen muscles in my back.

If there were any one place that I belonged, it had to have been there. There in one of the study rooms in the library. There were books here. There was the quiet contemplation of knowledge, the surety of faith, and the heady scent of aging paper.

And, of course, far fewer people.

I had five minutes until the library closed, which, I figured, was enough time for me to return the book and start the walk back to my apartment without needing to endure any encounters with security sweeping the stacks for lingering students. Sure enough, the only other person I encountered on my way out was the page who numbly accepted the book at the returns desk. A wordless exchange; no small talk, not even a thank you.

The Minnesota night hung heavy around me on that walk back. The air seemed as loath to relinquish the heat of day as the year was to give in to autumn, but now it was nearly eleven, and the long hours of evening had managed to pull away some of the warmth. Mosquitoes drifted lazily beneath the trees, leading me to keep my ears canted back, lest they take interest.

Saint John's University was a lopsided circle nestled at the north edge of a narrow isthmus between two lakes, a marble set over a gap it couldn't hope to pass through. It would be easy enough for me to walk straight north to the apartments along the road that bisected the campus, but I preferred to put off walking along a road as long as possible. The noise — even if the noise was only in the lights around me — was too much.

Instead, I headed east from the library, walking bowered sidewalks for as long as I could. Past the utilities building, past the bookstore, until I hit the quad, that almost-rectangle of grass and trees and sidewalks pinned in the middle of campus. Only then did I turn north, walking through close-cut grass instead of along the sidewalks.

There, at last, I could look up and see the stars.

My steps were slow, contemplative. It wasn't a meander; my walk still had purpose. Instead, it was a putting-off of the inevitable. The inevitable time when I would rejoin walking along the road. The inevitable moment of stepping into my dimly-lit apartment. A delaying of engaging with the real, physical world as long as possible.

Here, at last, I could look up and see the stars, could drink in God's majesty, could forget that I was myself, that I was a coyote plowing through both my scholarships and degree on nothing but momentum. I could forget that I was Dee, and get lost in my total and complete insignificance.

I could walk and I could pray.

Come, Holy Spirit, Divine Creator, true source of light and fountain of wisdom! Pour forth your brilliance upon my dense intellect…

It was here — here in the open, and back in the library — that was where I was most comfortable. Most myself.

Dee, the awkward coyote. Dee, who forgot to smile sometimes, who always seemed to say the wrong thing. Dee, with his nose forever in a book, forever in the book, reading and re-reading to tease ever-deeper meaning from scriptures he'd read a dozen times before.

…dissipate the darkness which covers me, that of sin and ignorance. Grant me a penetrating mind to understand…

Was that not why I was there at a seminary? To study and learn? To glean more from the word of God? To live in an ever more Christlike fashion?

Could I not best learn how to do so there? Was that not why I was there?

…a retentive memory, method and ease in learning, the lucidity to comprehend, and abundant grace…abundant grace in expressing myself…

I couldn't do it. I couldn't go back to my room just yet. All it held was my bed, my books, my aging laptop. Too-yellow lights, fourth-hand furniture, chipped paint.

Instead, I let my bag slip from my shoulder to the grass, and then I settled down to join it, tail flopped limply behind me. I drew my knees up to my chest and crossed my arms over them, resting my chin atop my forearms.

My head was too full. Too full of words and feelings that language failed to express. Lines from the epistles I'd been studying somehow wound up tangled with an awkwardly-shaped despair, a despair founded in the fact that, although I continued to excel in my studies, remained at the top of my classes, I still felt as though I was failing.

If you still dwell within my heart, I asked. Where are these feelings coming from? What is this disillusionment pointing to?

God spoke to me, then.

As ever, His voice was not in words, but woven into the world around me. A breeze came up from Stump lake, bearing with it the scent of water, of rotting vegetation, and overlaid atop it, a sweetness I could not place. It was floral, yes, but also fruity, so sweet as to make my mouth water.

I bristled my whiskers, and breathed in deeply, my eyes scanning trees lit by the occasional yellow sulfur lamp, stark battlements against the night sky. God spoke to me in the way my eyes perceived the night to fade from a blue-tinged gray at the tree-line up to the star-stained black above me. He spoke in the feeling of the short blades of grass poking up through the bristly fur of my tail, and He spoke in the citrus tang of a confession forming in my mouth.

“I don't want to be here."

30

It would be incorrect to say that the hike I took yesterday in some way “solved" the anxiety that I felt after the concert. There were, as I constantly tell myself, explain and explain and explain, no words from God. How would there be? How would it be the case that He would step in and say, “No, Dee, don't worry"?

I am trying not to get down on myself enough to lose all hope. I want to say, “This is so unimportant that I really need to just give up on the prospect." I want to recognize the futility in striving for a relationship. I want to buy into the egodystonia. I want to find some way to turn off that part of my mind that craves Kay, that dreams about the feeling of her cheek against mine and perseverates about holding her hand. How childish! How immature! How utterly beneath me that I struggle so hard with this!

But whatever.

I can't just turn all of those things off, but I can go ahead and admit that this isn't going anywhere. I can recognize that she wouldn't be a good romantic partner for me and I wouldn't be for her, and, even if the feelings don't go away, drop any hope of pursuing them. We Catholics are so good at repression, are we not?

There's nothing to be had but friendship, and I can aim for that, at least.

Today, Kay took me to a used bookstore near campus, and we spent a good hour and a half there, digging through the shelves. She sold me almost instantly on the place with the explanation that this was the type of place that would eagerly buy up all of the weird and obscure books that students pick up in their studies. Not just textbooks, though they certain took some of those when the university bookstore would not buy them back, but supplementary materials and personal hyperfixation-induced deep-dive book purchases.

Kay spent most of that time prowling through the music section, and me digging among shelves of exegeses and commentaries ¹. Occasionally, we would head back to the other to show them something of particular interest that we had found. At one point, she brought me a book on harmony written by some composer and laughingly read aloud a short section from the beginning, a scathing indictment of music critics, and we agreed that he must have, at some point, had a concert ripped to shreds in the papers. I brought her a whole stack of apologetics by C. S. Lewis and we reminisced over reading The Chronicles of Narnia as kits.

I do not think I could come up with a more ideal bookstore, I have to say. It was almost the platonic ideal of a used bookstore. Friends always talk about the scent of books being intoxicating, and while I've always been somewhat mixed on it ², the scent of bookstores themselves are something that I am immensely fond of. It's not just the smell of the books that does it for me, but the shelves, the people, the lingering scent of those who might have handled the books before me. This book makes my whiskers bristle at the lingering scent of anxiety, that one was clearly loved and brought comfort. Whiskers bristle and I lose myself in the past of the place. There is something meta about the whole experience: books and also readers of those books.

I left after spending a surprisingly small amount of money on a surprisingly large number of books. The problem of fitting them all into my luggage for the trip home is a problem for future Dee.

Following the bookstore, we walked a block to an Ethiopian restaurant. I had never tried such cuisine before and while it was not unpleasant, I am still trying to puzzle out the tastes.

The rest of the day was spent lounging at Kay's place, reading. She parked herself in her computer chair so that she could listen to her scores and insisted that I just use her bed — there being no other place to sit — so I propped myself up against the wall with her pillows and poked through my haul. ³ It wasn't the most comfortable of seats, and I had to dedicate a small portion of my mind at all times to ignoring the scent of Kay clinging to the sheets and pillowcases, but it was enjoyable arranging and rearranging the stack in what order might be best to read them in.

Kay, for her part was doing much the same, and whenever I would look over, she would be chewing on her cheek or a claw. She kept tapping out rhythms on the page of whatever page of a score she was looking at, humming arpeggios, and at least once I caught her nodding and tapping her tail about behind her, and when she looked up and saw me, she smiled bashfully and mumbled an apology.

It was a pleasant afternoon, all told, and we followed it up with a simple dinner of chicken that she cooked on her ancient stove and more shared videos, as has long been our habit.

Now I am back in the room that I'm staying in, surrounded by the non-scent of scent-block hiding whoever had stayed there before me, layered over with a thin darkness of my own scent.

I am embarrassed to admit that the change of scentscape has left me a little jarred today, in particular due to the fact that it had clearly been a few days since she had washed her sheets, and there was an unmistakable undertone of what I take to be sexuality clinging to those sheets. I do not doubt that she gets as aroused as any other healthy coyote of her age might, and I imagine that she is no stranger to masturbation. This is in no way surprising and yet I was in a continual state of tense wariness and low-level arousal of my own that I desperately hoped she could not smell in turn.

That, above all things is what I found myself needing to tune out. I buried my nose in book after book, and while that meant more than a mere whiff of mildew, it was less distracting by far.

I am trying to square my feelings about this. I am not immune to attraction, but the levels to which this complicates my feelings is uncomfortable. Here I am trying to convince myself to drop my attraction to her and my limbic system works against me.

I am not ashamed to admit that physiological response, but I am ashamed that I was unable to keep myself from acting on it — it seemed necessary if I was to sleep in any level of comfort. I shall have a confession in my future, but then, I knew that already.

_____

¹ And bibles. Countless bibles.

² It can get rather close to the scent of mildew, which makes me quite uncomfortable. Scent is complicated.

³ I picked up a few commentaries, a few that were more along the lines of pop-theology and a few that were quite dense and reminded me strongly of my time at St. John's to the point where I could almost smell the study room I spent so many hours in, the scratched desk and rickety chair. I also acquired books on psychology that I'd heard about from colleagues and had been meaning to read. Of note were two books on shame and vulnerability. How appropriate.

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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.

---

21

Boise is much as I remember it. Sprawling, flat. The trip up I-84 is familiar enough to tug loose memories from when my parents would take me up every few months to see a specialist, ¹ only now there are far more billboards and what used to be strip malls have turned into tumbled collections of big-box stories, imposing, half-rendered amongst the landscape of scrub and crumbling roads.

I did not miss it, and it seems indifferent to my return.

Kay is still at work for a while yet ² and I cannot check into my rented room for another few hours, so I have camped out in a café in the neighborhood where I will be staying.

I cannot put my finger on what exactly feels so different about this place from Sawtooth. There is a different tension in those around me. The landscape is similar enough, but there are more buildings, and they are situated just a little too close together, compared to what I'm used to. There is more exhaust in the air.

But it's still Idaho. We're only a hundred and change miles up the road from Sawtooth. The water tastes the same. The temperature is the same. It's all more of the same. Not just in the sense of the ongoing homogenization that is part of living in the west, but it really is no different than Sawtooth, other than it's bigger and more expensive.

It was the bus ride, perhaps. It was that liminal seat, half-reclined. It was the window with scrub grass and cows and small farms blurring past. It was those two hours and the knowledge that I would be elsewhere that put me in the mind of differences.

I suspect that I will feel out of sorts for a little bit, yet, at least until I meet up with Kay.

After all, it could also just be lingering expectation.

_____

¹ I don't remember what it was for, in particular, and my parents never talked about it once I got older. I think they may have been concerned about a learning disability. I only remember heading up to a house on the outskirts of town, talking for an hour or so while I played with toys on the floor, and then we would go get food and head home. It was a two hour drive, and I would usually sleep on the trip back. I wish I could remember more of it.

² The library, natch.

22

I met up with Kay an hour or so after I checked in to my room — enough time for me to shower and change clothes. The sent of the bus still lingered in my nose, but that may have just been my imagination.

I wish I could say that it was some joyous reunion, but instead, it was just as though we had picked off from where we had been after our chat the night before. We said hi to each other without fanfare and simply walked to dinner. She had picked out some sandwich place that she said she frequented for lunch ¹ which was perfectly acceptable fare.

Afterwards, we walked around a nearby park. Perhaps by virtue of how well-tended it was, it was something of a shock to be dropped into green after all the drabness of the city and the brown of the landscape before that. I will not deny my pleasure briefly cutting through grass to walk beneath trees rather than just padding always along sidewalks.

We walked and we talked.

At first, it was awkward and somewhat stilted as we subconsciously renegotiated our interactions with each other in the embodied world. It is easy enough to chat or not when one is bound to a screen. Even voice-only communication is different when one can mute oneself, or only be heard when hitting a key on the keyboard.

The immediacy of interacting in person, however, brought with it all those scattered silences, filled pauses, and other dysfluencies. It also brought the universal problem of where to look. Do I look at my interlocutor? Do I look at the ground, the sky, the trees? Do I acknowledge those others we come across?

I am so terrible at this.

Eventually, though, we fell back into old patterns. Despite our daily conversations over text or voice, there was a surprising amount to catch up on once we both opened up again. Kay spoke about her time in her masters program, how it differed in structure from her undergrad, the ongoing struggles of finding others to perform her works. I talked about settling into my practice and how I was able to get my full license, about my patients (anonymously, of course), and about my own therapy.

Despite this catching-up, the conversation was all so quotidian. I can't think of any other way to put it, but we just talked about “normal" things. What else could we talk about with each other?

I suppose we could talk about feelings, but walking through the park on the very first evening that I was there, looking forward to a week of time in close proximity, such as it were…well, it did not feel like the right time to bring any of that up.

I am unsure of how to process this first night just yet. The anxiety that I was feeling beforehand, as well as the slowly unwinding tension as we began to speak more freely seems to have taken much of the worries about my feelings for her off my mind, and I was simply focused at first on recalculating what level of masking ² was required around her, and later on the sheer mundanity of our catching up. I am left wondering what that means, if it means anything. Perhaps it is a habit thing — we fell back into our usual patterns — but more likely it means nothing. We're friends, we talked like friends, and that's it.

I did at least learn that she's single, so there is that.

_____

¹ The part of me which has been so focused on memories writing this journal teamed up with that part always on the lookout for hidden meaning to make me wonder if this was an intentional callback to our shared lunches back in Sawtooth.

² The hypervigilant psychologist part of me cannot stop thinking in these terms, and the part of me striving for emotional connection loathes that.

23

Kay has taken a few days off of work while I am out here, but we wound up intentionally leaving plans fairly loose.

I do not know her reason for doing so, but if I am honest, I left plans open ended because I was not sure what we are, or what our dynamic would look like until I arrived here. Are we just friends? Are we on to something more? Is it weird for friends to go out to a nice dinner? A movie ought to be fine, but should that influence the genre?

I wrote yesterday that we were friends, that we talked like friends, and that that was it because that might indeed be the dynamic of our relationship, I still must contend with these strange and awkwardly shaped feelings for her. I cannot say whether or not it would be weird for me to suggest a nice dinner for the both of us ¹ or going to see a romantic film because I cannot say whether or not this unavoidable set of emotions will make it so.

Either way, I have my list of suggestions and she has mentioned that she has a few ideas of her own, so I suspect that the open-ended nature of our plans won't lead to excruciating boredom or anything like that.

Today went well enough, on that note. I slept in, knowing that she would do the same, and stopped by that same café once more for a leisurely coffee and pastry while I waited for her to text me that she was up and about. She gave me the address of her building and the door code to get in, as well as a coffee order, so I topped up my drink and picked up hers in order to head over. It was a pleasant enough walk, as the day had yet to heat up.

She greeted me at the door in a wrinkled tee and pair of shorts, smiled sheepishly at her unready state, and gestured me into her apartment.

It was a single rectangular room: bed in one corner, desk against the wall next to it, breakfast bar separating the kitchen from the rest of the space, not so far removed from a dorm room, minus the fact that she had her own bathroom and closet rather than being forced to share with others.

A rumpled bed, a messy desk.

And the almost overwhelming scent of her. I made it two steps into the room and my mind ceased to function. I might as well have grown talons and wings, for all I know, for all I could do was stand there, coffees in hand, and try and blink away memories and too-strong emotions. I remembered her scent as though a lingering thing, faded touches cheek to cheek within my dreams. I remembered it, but I did not remember its strength, it's depth, it's overwhelming her-ness. It was inescapable, unavoidable, permeating and so much more than any lingering dream could ever hope to encompass.

It's a wonder I was able to hand her the correct coffee.

I must have had some strange look on my face, as part way through the sip of her mocha, she tilted her head and lowered her cup.

“Everything alright, Dee?"

I raced through the masking checklist, realized that my whiskers were bristled almost uncomfortably far, my ears were laid flat, I was blinking rapidly, and my tail was tip-tapping about anxiously. I immediately felt an overwhelming sense of guilt, which I did my best to hide behind what I hoped was a bashful expression. “Yeah, sorry," I managed.

She frowned all the same and put down her coffee, padding over to the window to wind it open a short ways. “Sorry, maybe should've sprayed some block. I bet it stinks in here."

“No!" I said, realized that sounded forceful, and added, “No, sorry. Just smells like you, is all, and I feel like I got punched in the face with memories from school."

At that, she laughed, though she did leave the window open, a trimmer chattering below marring her scent with traces of exhaust. “Well, good ones, I hope. Still, I'm sorry it's such a mess."

“It's fine, Kay, really. Just random memories–" Tell her, tell her, tell her, some part of my mind was urging. It had Jeremy's voice. “–like going to concerts, or your senior recital." Tell her! the voice shouted, pounded on the walls, clawed at my insides, all while half-truths spilled from my lips.

And then, the moment was past.

“Oh! Speaking of, there's two nights of that percussion festival, but I figured we'd just hit up the one tomorrow." She reacquired her coffee and crawled back onto the mussed-up covers of her bed, gesturing me toward her desk chair, the sole other piece of furniture in the studio. “The final night is always the best, because all the stressful master classes and such are over, and everyone is just playing like crazy and really feeling it. At least, that's how it always is with me and festivals. The days are all filled with classes and the evenings are concerts, and the last one, you're just riding on some weird music high. Uh…sorry."

I had leaned back into the computer chair, which had creaked under my weight, and peeked over at some of the papers on her desk — impenetrable sheet music, for the most part. “Sorry? For what?"

“Just rambling, I guess."

“Goodness, no, you're fun when you ramble," I laughed. “I guess I got kind of awkward there, sorry, didn't mean to pry through your papers."

She relaxed back against the wall and let her shoulders slump, holding the coffee in both hands now, tail relaxing from where it had curled around protectively. “Right, yeah. Sorry. I have some folks at work who very visibly lose interest."

“I'm still interested, promise." I smiled as disarmingly as I could and made an attempt to focus through the scent that still tickled its way through my mind.

“Well, thanks," she said, smiling lopsidedly. “I feel kind of weird because, like…um. I mean this in a good way, but I kinda forgot how awkward you are, and remember that I'm awkward as hell too, and that I can just be my awkward-ass self around you 'cause you're always listening at a hundred percent or whatever, and if you're uninterested you'll just change the subject and…"

She trailed off and averted her eyes over to the kitchen, focusing on a wayward glass. All the last had come out in a rush of justifications, half-apologies, and self-deprecation.

“You're fine, Kay. I've gotta be the world's most awkward coyote, and if you're the second most awkward, well, we just make a heck of a pair."

She puffed out a breath and then took a long sip of her coffee. “Mm, right. I'm out of practice in being around someone as…I don't know, genuine as you."

It all tugged at my heartstrings, and I prayed for the bravery to reassure her. “You seem kind of anxious. Everything alright?"

“Yeah, I'm just jittery, I guess. Nervous."

“Nervous about anything in particular?"

She squinted over at me. “You've gotten good at your therapist voice."

I laughed.

“Nah, I don't think so," she continued. Another sip, and then, “I'm realizing how boring I am, and I'm anxious that I'll bore the shit out of you while you're here."

“There's no pressure on my end. We could watch videos online for a few days like we would do anyway and it'd still be a vacation for me."

“I mean, I wouldn't turn that down either." She grinned. “I just don't have anyone around here like you, so I just kind of do my own thing which is not much."

The rest of the day went smoothly. I remember fairly little of it. We got food. We walked to the library and she showed me around. We walked around the campus. We picked up dinner and brought it back to her place where we watched videos as we might have done on any other night.

I remember very little of the specifics, other than the feelings of the day. The feeling of glowing over her words, someone as genuine as you and anyone around here like you sticking with me as thoroughly as her scent.

_____

¹ The fact that I am working full time in a reasonably well-paying position while Kay works in a library to fund her living expenses while taking out further student loans means that I fully intend on paying for most everything while I am out here. I really hope that doesn't make her feel awkward, or, heaven forbid, like I am trying to buy her attention. This is all so difficult.

24

I am struggling to internalize just what went wrong tonight.

Today was fine. We spent it mostly just dealing with lunch and then poking around for food at a supermarket in case we wanted to cook later. Snacks were also lacking at Kay's so we grabbed a few.

From there, we headed to the percussion festival, which was a short bus trip away. The auditorium was a work of wood fabric panels set into a horn shape, panels all angled in slightly different directions for some acoustic reason that I could not figure out. A pretty, if chaotic structure.

Kay, as I remember from our time in school, brought along earplugs which she put in shortly before the concert started.

I think I struggled with that the most, in some way. I know that she did so to keep from getting overwhelmed, and I know that she did it with every concert, but with all of our conversations leading up to the night along with the fact that she did so well before the music started, it felt as thought I was being shut out. She put in her earplugs and focused on the music all night long, and it was as if, for her, only the music existed.

I am sure that it was some form of active listening on her part, if there is such a thing with music. Analytic listening? Something along those lines.

And yet it was so strange to go from making each other laugh to absolutely no contact with each other, other than the fact that we were sitting next to each other. I should be respectful of her style of engaging with music. I know that, of course. Just as I should be respectful of the concert and the performers there.

It was just so sudden. I ceased to exist, for her. I became a non-entity stuck in a place entirely out of my element.

The music appeared to be perfectly competent. There were rhythms that I could pick up on in the majority of the works, and occasionally a melody that I picked out that fit with my expectations for music.

This should not bother me. It shouldn't bother me at all. She has shown me countless recordings of pieces as strange as the ones I heard tonight, and back when we were in school, I attended several concerts with her of varying quality. Even when my feelings about her began to build, I never really had a problem with our shared silences during performances (such as they are, during a shared video stream).

It never has bothered me, and so why did it tonight? Was it something we did before the concert started? Grocery shopping and lunch? What about that could lead to such a reaction? Was it the reminders of lunches from the past? I'm not sure of that, as we had lunch yesterday and there was no such attachment. Was it the domesticity of going to a grocery store together? Am I attaching meaning to something so mundane?

And even now, it's not as though it was so sudden and surprising as I make it sound. Before the concert, we had to show our tickets, we had to file into the concert hall and find our seats. It was all so hushed, and slow. It was all as I remember it, really. And we did talk, too. She explained some of the pieces she recognized from the program, one of which she promises she had shown me before (though I didn't remember it from the name and composer alone). Afterward, she talked plenty on the way home, and I listened to her gush about the music she enjoyed and complain about the music that she didn't, and while I listened, some part of me was growing more and more frustrated, almost resentful.

Why am I like this?

I don't know what to do with this information, and I think it bothers me most at one level of remove. I felt shut out, and that is irksome on its own, but what really bothers me is that I felt bothered in the first place. I felt so bothered that I bent memories when writing this, and only on rereading them did I realize that I was doing so. I'm bothered that I am apparently so fragile as to be set on edge by perfectly normal actions.

It's things like this that set limerence in an egodystonic light. I hate it. I hate that I like her and then get envious of the fact that she is enjoying something without me, something that we don't share.

Resentment! Envy! Over what? What do I not possess that I wish that I did but her? And how idiotic is that?

I hate that I feel this way, and then I hate myself for building up so much resentment at myself. No matter the layer of remove, I feel like I fucked up.

I almost wrote “I think I might go home early" but I really don't think that I will. I am confronted with the fact that things will never live up to the ideal that limerence demands, and it has me frustrated, but not so much that I'm going to pull some overly dramatic nonsense like that.

I'm just glad that there are no more concerts while I'm here.

25

I am up early again, and while I do feel better, I am also still feeling tender, and feeling cautious of that tenderness. I want to poke and prod at it. I want to explore its boundaries as one might find the limits of a bruise.

I know better.

At least, that's what I tell myself. I know better than to keep poking at a sore spot, so to that end, I'm digging into the other topic that Jeremy has been nudging me to explore, that of my discernment and sudden veering off the pastoral track and over to wherever it is that I am now. It's been years now, since I left, and although I may just be poking at a different sore spot, it is at least one that I know I have work to do around. There are memories there, might as well do the CBT thing and think back to what happened, and then back before that.

It's weird the things that you remember, though. Just little things.

I remember blinking my eyes rapidly in the middle of that meeting, for some reason. It's a habit I now know that I have, and once I learned of it, I noticed just how often I do it. I found myself thinking back to all of the times that I had done in it in the past, and there are a few stand out examples that stick in the mind as particularly embarrassing. ¹

I remember blinking rapidly there, in the middle of that meeting, yes, and I remember Rev. Dr. Borenson leaning forward, rested his arms on his desk, and fiddling with a pencil. “Mr. Kimana?"

“Sorry, Father." I frowned down at my paws. Paws grown soft, that far away from home. Some part of my mind, the part always focused on making comparisons, realized how slender and small they were compared to my advisor's big canine mitts, soft from a life of academia and ministry. “I think I was expecting a different reaction."

The Saint Bernard shrugged. It was an informal, almost bashful gesture coming from him. “I'm just not surprised. This doesn't feel like it's coming out of nowhere."

“I have no plans of leaving the Church."

“Of course, Dee. I have no doubts as to your faith."

“But…?"

Borenson sighed, set the pencil down. “Your studies are fine. Better than fine, I'm told. Your teachers speak highly of your writing. That's only half of the program, though. You came here for an masters of divinity, and the end goal of that program is ministry. Your skills in scripture and apologetics, in books, are admirable, but would make for an incomplete priest. We've talked before about you heading for a masters of theology instead, but you balked at that."

I canted my ears back, gritted my teeth, and masked his frustration as best I could. “With all due respect, Father, my concerns about a Th.M stand. Yes, I'm sure I'd be helping the world with research and writing, but I need something more immediate. I need to help people. I don't think I can not do that. And there's just too much…I don't know, remove, I suppose, if all I'm doing is writing."

There was a pause as Borenson seemed to manage some equal frustration before he spoke. “Mr. Kimana, an education such as this requires both flexibility and devotion. Both a Th.M and MDiv would require that. Now–" He held up his paws as if to forestall a rebuttal. “I am not accusing you of lacking in either department at least not to a level where I feel you are not a good degree candidate, but if the doubts in your head are strong enough that you feel you need to leave, I would only be doing your future vocation a disservice by trying to make you stay."

I dropped my gaze once more. I spread my fingers, tracing with my eyes the subtle grain on the pads of my paws, the long-healed callouses.

This remains a constant in my life, this sort of discussion. I will research and research and research, come to a conclusion, and when I state what I have learned, the conversation would go sideways. Both me and my interlocutor will wind up frustrated and stressed with no discernable reason why.

But this hadn't been a researched thing, had it? I remember it being something like three in the afternoon, and I'd started this train of thought the night before at, what, eleven? Sixteen hours was hardly the amount of time required to come to a conclusion about leaving behind a year and a half of study and however many thousands of dollars of scholarships that had involved.

No, this idea had leaped, fully formed, into my head.

I focused on ensuring that my mien expressed the sincerity I felt within. I was frustrated, yes, but also confused and more than a little disappointed in myself. “I'm sorry, Father Borenson. I understand. You're right, too, I suppose, that I don't quite have the amount of conviction I'd need for this." The word 'conviction' stuck in my craw, I remember that. ² “Not conviction, I guess. Something to do with ministry. I don't do groups."

“I mean it when I say I'm speaking from a place of kindness here, Mr. Kimana, but this doubt is mutual. You have a brilliant mind and faith enough, but by virtue of you doubting your vocation, we are all but obligated to doubt you in turn."

I sighed and slouched in my chair.

“If you're not comfortable switching to a Th.M, perhaps it's time to consider switching focuses," the dog said gently. “Perhaps Saint John's just isn't the best fit for you."

“I get it," I mumbled.

The Saint Bernard looked cautious, waited for me to continue.

“I mean, I get what you're saying. I think…" I swallowed drily, straightened up in my chair. “I think I agree, too."

There it was. There was the admission. I'd said it at last.

My advisor visibly relaxed.

“I know I said so before, but I just want to make sure; you know that this is about my vocation, not my faith, right?"

Borenson barked a laugh, before his expression softened. “I'm sorry, Dee, I shouldn't have laughed. I believe you. You are one of the most devout students I have. Your decision about your degree may not have been a total surprise to me, but if you had said you were leaving the church, I think I would have called for a doctor."

I smiled, I remember. I smiled through my shame.

_____

¹ I suspect there is some reason that such embarrassing things stick in one's own mind while slipping so easily from others'. Perhaps it is a symptom of culture, or perhaps it is simply part and parcel of existing in the world.

² I write these memories like a story. It is an occasional dalliance, and I do not quite know where it formed, but it has been with me since youth, to the point where teachers often suggested I major in creative writing. I did consider it, I will admit, though I know it isn't something my parents would necessarily have condoned. Whether or not the words I write here are an exact replication of the conversation that took place is neither here nor there; whether or not I am accurately remembering the emotions that took place is unimportant. I am writing for me now.