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When she leaves, it isn’t done straight, pun unintentional. At the time it felt like stepping through a door that opens out over a cliff. Heart-pounding, inevitable and irreversible. A world ended for her that day when she got into her father’s car, the two of them sitting in stony and awkward silence as he drove her home from the convent where she’d spent three years praising and blessing and screaming at and, ultimately, wrestling with God.
When she leaves she finds for at least a year afterwards she is able to discern two worlds in parallel around her. One is her life now as a former nun, navigating the tense atmosphere in the home of her devoutly Catholic parents and working part-time as a cashier at the café down the road while taking online classes to become an engineer. (‘Left secondary school, joined a convent, professed vows in my third year and left the order two months later’ doesn’t exactly make for a strong resume.) The other world is her life as it would have been had she decided to stay. This second layer to her existence is visible around the major Church holidays, of course. Lent was a relief to put behind her, whereas Advent was a fucking nightmare that year. And when the bells of the cathedral several blocks away ring at Christmas and on Easter, when the strains of familiar hymns bleed through stained glass windows, she now finds she must turn away, must remind herself to be gentle with herself, must find a quiet corner where it won’t be so terribly embarrassing to let herself cry.
More vivid even than the emotions she feels at holidays are the ones that rise alongside unbidden memories of her days at the convent. The scent of cigarette smoke takes her back to shifts in the convent kitchen, the lay volunteers ducking out for a smoke. Suddenly, she is back in her body in that moment. The volunteers laugh and joke with each other. With her. Past their shoulders and through the open door, she can see the damp green hills that surround the convent. She smells rain mixed with the smoke, can hear the clang of pots behind her. This morning she has prayed, in two hours she will pray at Vespers, tomorrow morning she will wake up early enough that the darkness stings her eyes from lack of light, and she will pray again. She, Sister Mary Bernadette, lives on faith.
Only…no, that’s not it. She’s standing still on the sidewalk in front of some small shop or other back home. People push past her. It is raining. A stranger is huddled in the doorway, cradling a smoke in their hand, and that’s the scent that sent her back, and in some other life she would still be there.
But no. Not in this one. She kicked that door open and chose to fall through. She is no longer, and will never be again, Sister Mary Bernadette.
Mother Superior writes her a few months after her departure from the order. The letter is filled with nothing but well-wishes. She’s grown enough of a scab over her chosen loss to be able to skim over the parts about ’I trust God will lead you home’ and ’the Holy Spirit works in wondrous ways.' That’s all fine and good. What really hurts is the updates on her fellow—former—Sisters. (Sister Maria Goretti has been given her first teaching assignment at a school attached to a small parish. Sister Mary Alma, driven as ever, is drawing up arrangements with local farmers to buy their produce for the kitchens. And Sister Mary Agnes, who took sick last fall, is, by the grace of God, getting better.) What really hurts is the use of her former—current—name, written in the hand of her Mother Superior.
She is Beatrice Yu. The skin of this life is one she has not worn in so long. It does not fit, it itches. She feels starkly exposed every time she is in public. She is no longer either version of who she was.
So who is she now?
When she isn’t working her shifts at the café or doing schoolwork for her engineering classes, she finds out. She goes to a bar one weekend. Gets drunk, throws up in the bathroom, somehow manages not to wake her parents up when she stumbles back home after midnight.
She goes to a gay bar the next weekend. (Beatrice Yu is nothing if not bold and decisive, especially concerning the things that terrify her.) It is loud and she has little memory of the night—not due to drinking, she has learned her lesson and requests only water from the bartender, but because panic erases the experience from her synapses almost entirely.
She goes again the next weekend, decides bars aren’t for her, and goes to a bookstore the next weekend to browse their selection of queer literature. There in the cramped aisles, she meets her first girlfriend.
Over time her skin begins to feel more like hers, she moves through the world with more ease and confidence. She gets good grades in her classes and takes on extra shifts at the café when she can in order to start building some savings. Her girlfriend breaks up with her and it’s bittersweet and—it hurts, but not as much as she might have expected. She’s broken her own heart once already and it’s a somewhat transferable experience, in a way that she privately finds very funny. It’s almost a relief to have a relationship behind her because now she knows what it entails, she knows what it’s like. She knows more of herself and what this world she has chosen may hold for her in the future.
Yet (‘world without end…’) having left the faith, she finds that faith still trails behind her. It is like a spiral. It is like a familiar song coming on the radio every time she tunes in. It is like a mass of interwoven threads inside her, a tapestry some days, a Gordian knot on others.
Pick up the thread of fate, for instance. Destiny and free will. Though she now instinctively and vehemently rejects the idea of a calling (look where hers led), she finds she is unable to ignore coincidences. Is unable to let go of the desire to know that what she does means something, that it contributes toward some greater end. Two roads diverged in a wood…if God made the one she walks and the one she does not walk, what does that say about fate? What does it say about love, about life? She did not choose to be queer, did not choose to be raised Catholic. She did choose to become a nun, and to leave the order, and to take engineering classes. She chose to accept a job in a factory overseas in the States. She has loved one woman and will love others. She believes love to be an unending string of choices and yet, and yet…from out of the darkness that enveloped her in her long fall from faith, in that darkness where even now she sees stars, she wants so desperately for there to be a voice addressing her and her love, saying with surety, “It is good."
Two roads diverged and regardless of which one she chooses it does not matter how many others have traveled it. What matters is that she has not and does not know what lies ahead. It matters that another road exists—parallel—that she now will never know. Who she is not is as close to her as who she is.
And so she circles back, and back, and back again.