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.

  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 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.26

  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.27 “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.

  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.

 

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