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He is walking away from her, heart in his throat. The darkness does little for him except remind him of what he’d lost. The silence is deafening, the oddest of placements in the ripe center of London. He can’t feel his hands or the grip he has over the jacket in his palms, barely has a grip on what he’d said out loud.
I love you, too.
It’s painful, the way the right thing jars you. He’d picked up the pieces of what feels like love to him and molded it back into something the Lord could forgive. He knows what love is now, how different it feels in his chest over the Love he finds in his faith. He’s no stranger to what exists beyond the realms of spirituality, no stranger to nameless things and experiences, and peace in its very nature.
There’s a kind of love that lasts and he’d found it in his calling. In the way the spiritual moves you to be kinder, to be grounded in a way that is holy. To go where he is called or needed. To be found when he is wanted. To exist just to exist. It’s a lonely life, the kind he can’t really talk about without the stares turning into concern turning into a polite indifference.
But she is the opposite of loneliness to him. He had figured that out, sunlight playing over her features, enough for him to feel that thundering, that loud thing, that love he’d almost been too afraid to name. There is little in him now, with the words falling out of his mouth like a tide he can barely contain. He’s fraught with it, the emptiness suddenly carving a deep gash through his lungs, through what feels like the rapid pace of his heartbeat, through what could be the recesses of his soul.
It’s unfair, he thinks, to love God deeply without grounding it into something real and tangible. Like her hand in his, or the line of his jaw, or the tangle of his hair through his fingers. He thinks love is awful, a painful thing, almost like heartbreak at every turn. And he thinks love, thinks sinful, thinks those two words don’t fall into the same place. He’s got the Lord turning in his grave, he’s sure of it. Kissing beautiful women with a calling like his lowers the chances of a shot at heaven. And even then, the yearning is all consuming.
London is quiet, for once, like he’d shut out everything except what he holds in his heart. It’s messy and fragile, turning him inside out leaving him bereft of something he never could have had. Except, he’d had it for what feels like the brief passing of time. And they’d both known it, felt it lay itself quietly over their shoulders, weighing down the silences, the long stares, the stillness between them.
She offers a cigarette to him, lighting it for him, and the smoke spirals upwards with the intent to disappear and he wants so badly for the moment to be the opposite of it. To hold it in time, to grip what he knows will be gone.
He had knelt many times in the confessional, turning his sins into soft spoken words.
Saying things like I’ve loved a woman more than I loved God, stings on its way out, cutting deeper than he’d imagined but still, the way the words fall out of him feel like reverence, like his truth. Like his peace in the most unimaginable of ways. His peace, not one from the heavens or what is holy. His peace in the soft line of her brow, in the peal of her laughter. In that small cafe, sitting too close to each other, in the cigarette smoke in the hush of London.
It’ll pass, he says like it’s easy. Figuring that it’s what she wants to hear, to finally be told what to do. To hold on to something he can believe in, like what faith is to him. Like what he is to her these days. Like a reverie, a safe place, a soft place to land.
And he had lost it all, walking away from that bus stop, turning around just once to find her trembling in the aftermath. The hate he has for himself rises up, drowns him a little, forces him to fucking own his decision even if it kills him.
“I don’t know what this feeling is,” he’d gasped into her mouth.
“Is it God or is it me?” she had teased, pressed up against the wall.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” and confessing that hadn’t felt like glass in his mouth, it felt like salvation.