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It had started, as all things did, she supposed, with God.
The God. Her God.
In seven days and seven nights, He created the heavens and the earth, the waters and the land, the birds of the sky and the creatures of the deep. Light and darkness. Beauty and order.
And later—much later—He made her.
Only, something went wrong in the process.
Her father told her once that he always knew something was off with her. She was far more prone to playing with her sister’s dolls than to going out and playing kickball or building with the block set her aunt had gifted her a few Christmases prior.
Tommy doesn’t remember enough of her childhood to refute this. The years blur together—hazy Polaroids of birthday cakes, dewy early mornings racing to the car for school, her sister teasing her, chasing her through the hallways with glue or mud on her fingers, intent on smearing them across her—his then—small face. Years of class, the walls changing color from classroom to classroom, desks stiff and worn from years of students just like her.
But what she remembers most—more than any birthday, more than any lesson or punishment or kiss goodnight—is the feeling.
The quiet ache of not-quite-rightness, like an ill-fitting shirt she couldn’t take off or an itch buried just deep enough in the skin to never be soothed, but by raking her nails across her flesh till she bled or sinking her teeth into the supple flesh to at least turn the itch into pain.
Pain, she could deal with.
Pain, she learned, was easier than the in-between. Pain gave shape to what she felt. It gave it edges. A name, almost.
That ache—It, as she would come to call it—grew louder with time.
At first, it merely tugged. Then it knocked. Then it screamed. By the time she reached her late teens, it had become a volcano, molten and unchecked, bubbling just beneath her skin, waiting for the smallest wrong word or sideways glance to erupt and scorch everything in its path. Herself included. Especially herself.
Eventually, she turned to God.
She, like many children, was far more concerned with figuring out how many colors they could make with their fingerpaint or how long their could hold their breath before they turned purple and blue and their parents shouted at them to just breathe damnit, was not particularly faithful in her youth.
Her mother, though, was another story.
A cradle Catholic, devout and immovable. She raised them with a deep, bone-deep reverence for God and His Son—and a fear that curled like smoke in the lungs. God was love, yes. But He was also judgment. Fire. The voice on the mountain and the sword in the garden.
Every Sunday, without fail, they dressed in their best: Pressed skirts and clean collars. Polished shoes. A little bow in her sister’s hair, and tie snug up against the swell of his throat, just tight enough to make her flinch but not enough to complain.
They sat in the same pew every week. Her mother’s hand tight on her shoulder if she fidgeted. Her sister whispering the Lord’s Prayer too quickly. The homilies rarely stuck, but the rules did: Speak when spoken to. Sit up straight. Fold your hands just so.
There was no room in that house for questions, only obedience. No space to ask why her prayers went unanswered, or why the voice in her own body seemed to cry out louder than the one in the pulpit.
When she was fourteen, she began going to Mass on weekdays. Not because anyone made her, but because she was looking—desperate—for something. A cure. A reason. A punishment. Something that would either fix her or finally tell her that she was beyond saving.
She fasted.
She confessed.
She lit candles until her fingers blistered.
She asked to speak with priests in quiet corners, phrasing things in hypotheticals, in riddles, always just enough to be safe.
“Father, if someone felt wrong in the body God gave them…”
“Father, is suffering the body’s fault, or the soul’s?”
The answers were always the same:
We must trust in God’s design. Temptation is not sin, so long as it is not acted upon. Pray harder. Offer it up.
So she did. For years.
And all the while, It kept growing.
And then. It stopped.
For a brief, blissful moment, everything was fine.
The ache quieted. The thoughts grew still. She was good. Obedient. Pious.
There was no itch, no ache, no hollow longing in her chest. No hunger for more, for difference, for something better.
She was clean.
She told herself she had conquered it, had defeated the serpent coiled in her belly. God had seen her effort and rewarded it with silence. Peace. A miracle.
But nothing good ever lasts.
And the laity do not receive miracles.
Instead, it came back with a force she could not possibly have anticipated. If it was fire and magma, boiling in her core before, now it was darkness. A creeping ink, thick and oily, that spilled out of her very skin. A black rot that clung to her fingertips, her words, her thoughts. That followed her through doorways and settled in the corners of every room.
She became convinced that she was a contagion. That even holy ground might recoil at her touch.
So she stayed away. From churches. From chapels. From shrines and pews and parish halls.
For three years, she circled them like graves she dared not enter. The guilt turned her stomach to ash. She believed—truly believed—that if she stepped inside, the roof would cave in. That God would finally notice she was still breathing and decide to do something about it.
And then her mother died.
No warning, no sickness. No late-night trips to the ER or doctors with clipboards. Just didn’t wake up one morning.
Gone.
The funeral, of course, was held at the parish.
Their parish.
What was she to do? Not attend her own mother’s funeral?
Even now, all these years later, she cannot remember how she found the strength to walk through those doors. She only knows she did.
She wore black—pressed, neat, respectful. The kind of black that draws no attention.Not the pew they used to sit in, but the one nearest the coffin. She gripped the fabric of her slacks so tightly between her fingers that her nails left crescent moons in her thighs.
Her sister wailed beside her. Loud, raw, inconsolable.
But she—wept nothing.
Her tears were spent. Burned out long ago in bathrooms and confessional booths and sleepless nights curled in the back of closets.
How awful.
Looking back, this was the moment when everything changed.
After her mother died, her father, heartbroken, fell into misery. Nothing she or her sister did could help him.
So, selfishly, she left.
What was she to do? Sit around and watch him rot for the rest of her life?
She was an adult now, young, yes—and looking back now, her heart aches to think of how small she had been then, barely twenty-four—but an adult nonetheless. She had a life ahead of her, or she hoped she did.
Looking back, that was the moment. The moment everything turned.
After their mother’s death, her father—always a quiet man, always a little removed—became hollow.
Not cruel. Just absent.
Nothing she or her sister did could fill the void. They cooked, they cleaned, they prayed with him. He didn’t rage. He didn’t cry. He simply stopped living.
And she—She left.
She tells herself it was necessary.
She tells herself there was nothing more she could do.
And yet, it still feels like failure.
Her sister stayed. Always the better child. The loyal one. The steady one.
But she packed a single suitcase and got on a plane to New York with no real plan other than escape.
Seminary. Of all things.
The idea struck her like a spark to dry wood, and before she could talk herself out of it, she’d applied. Accepted. Gone.
She was only twenty-four. So young. It shames her now to think of how small she had been, how lost and cracked open—but also how fierce. How desperate to find something that would let her breathe.
And there, amid the towers and subways and sirens of New York, she found it.
First: God.
Not the God of her childhood—stern, punishing, absolute. But something deeper. Stranger. More tender. A God who whispered instead of thundered. A God who didn’t ask her to rip herself apart to be worthy.
Seminary felt like both sleepwalking and being reborn.
Time blurred.
She spent entire days hunched over theology textbooks in the echoing hush of the library, her fingers ink-stained and trembling.
She recited psalms aloud in the chapel like she was a child again learning her alphabet—except this time, she meant every word. Not because they promised salvation.
But because they sounded true.
And then—Al.
But let us speak of God first. Because it was He who made space in her chest for breath again. He who loosened the knots in her spirit. He who cracked open the sky just enough to let the light in.
When she tried on her cassock for the first time—black as ash, heavy as dusk, clean-lined and solemn— something inside her shifted. No joy, not exactly. Not ecstasy or revelation.
It was smaller than that.
Quieter.
Like the deep sigh of a locked door finally swinging open.
A recognition. A homecoming. A subtle but certain yes.
She hadn’t had the words for it then. No language yet for what she felt. Only the sense that, somehow, the world had tilted back into alignment by the barest degree.
The others—young men with earnest eyes and soft hands still calloused from their old lives—fidgeted in theirs. They tugged at the sleeves. Tripped on the hem. Their cassocks clung like obligation. The fabric draped them in duty, not delight. And when they walked, they walked like the robe was something to be survived— like the weight of God’s mercy was a stone hung around their necks.
But for her, it was different.
The fabric moved with her, not against her. It caught the air and flowed behind her like shadow and promise. The collar framed her jaw without choking it. The long hem kissed the floor with every step.
She felt, for the first time, right-sized in the world. Contained. Not hidden—held.
She moved through the seminary halls as if she'd always belonged there. Not as a visitor. Not as a stowaway.
But as someone who had finally arrived just where they were meant to.
And sometimes—when the late sun streamed in through the stained glass and threw red and gold across the stone— She imagined herself in the likeness of Michelangelo’s angels: broad-shouldered and radiant, cloaked in light, skirts billowing in impossible wind, arms strong enough to bear the weight of a trumpet or a sword or the Word itself.
She imagined descending from the clouds.
Holy. Fearsome.
Seen.
Surely this was not the image her peers conjured when they thought of their own calling.
They dreamed of pulpits. Parishes. Quiet sermons in winter. She dreamed of thunder. Of revelation.
Of being remade.
They walked uncertainly in their borrowed garments, still becoming who they might be. But she— She felt she had already become. Or rather: that she had finally begun.
Sometimes she wonders if she was always meant to be like this. If God, in all His omnipotence, has seen something in her, and known all along what she would be. But why the suffering? What made her any different from them?
What possible purpose could this constant ache serve? This quiet, gnawing pain that never quite recedes, even now years and years later when things have finally reached a point where she can smile and not wonder if the shape of her lips and jaw betray her, or if the size of her hands alerts others of her wrongness..
What does it serve Him, for her to come so close to peace and never reach it?
Or maybe the others were right. Maybe she was wrong from the beginning. Twisted, misaligned. A mistake not of God’s making, but her own. Maybe she has misstepped somewhere along the walk of life, wandered too far off the path to ever be found again.
If God had intended for you to be a woman, then you would be, they say.
Is she not?
What is a woman, she asks them, and they sputter out nonsense.
A housewife.
A caretaker.
An entertainer.
A mother.
A womb.
She has never cradled a child at her breast, never laid out supper for a husband’s return, never folded linens into perfect white squares in a sunlit kitchen. Her womb is only the echo of something lost—or never there to begin with.
So then—yes? They must be right. She is not a woman.
And yet.
And yet.
And then, there was Al.
She hadn’t known him during seminary. Not really.
Their paths barely crossed, and when they did, it was with all the passing awareness of shadows brushing shoulders beneath a doorway.
They were not friends. Not classmates, not rivals, not even acquaintances in the meaningful sense.
In truth, she didn’t know he existed until well after they’d both graduated.
Her years in seminary had been spent almost entirely in the library, hunched over volumes of canon law and theology with the fervor of the starving. She consumed texts like Communion—bread and wine transubstantiated into a kind of survival.
She memorized the councils. Debated Augustine in her head. Argued silently with Aquinas while walking to Morning Prayer. She read herself raw trying to understand not just God, but why she still couldn’t feel right in her own skin—even while wearing His name.
There was no room for distraction. No time for companions.
She avoided the refectory when she could, preferring to eat in silence, and dodged community events with polite excuses or feigned illness. Solitude had become her sacrament.
And yet—Al had been there. All that time.
Their first real conversation didn’t happen until two years later— long after ordination, long after she’d been placed in a parish in Queens, long after she’d started to wonder whether she had made a terrible mistake.
It was at a conference—one of those quiet, gray-weathered gatherings meant for reflection and renewal, full of awkward lanyards and too much coffee.
She didn’t remember what the lecture had been about. Some forgettable panel on digital liturgy—which then had only just begun really.
But afterward, there he was, standing beside her in the buffet line, of all places. He looked at her, smiled faintly, and said: ‘Excuse me, miss—’
But she never heard the rest of it. It seemed as though the air in the room had rushed out from beneath her feet, leavingher breathless and alone.
Miss.
It struck her as extraordinarily odd, then, that he might make such a mistake.
Yes, her hair had grown out—nearly to her shoulders by that point. While most of her seminary cohort had kept theirs clipped short and neat, hers had lengthened quietly over the years, a slow rebellion she barely noticed until it was too late to pretend it was unintentional.
Her skin was soft, yes. She’d never been one for sports, for weight rooms or roughhousing, and it showed. But she wasn’t delicate.
There was muscle beneath the softness—thin, lean. She’d been called wiry more than once, as though her body had been strung together by tension alone.
She hadn’t worn her cassock that day—who would, at a conference?
It seemed theatrical.
Instead, she’d worn trousers and a soft, pale blue jumper.
Blue, after all, was a man’s color. Wasn’t it?
She remembered the way the sweater sat on her frame. The way she’d folded the sleeves up at the wrists. The collar that hugged her throat just so.
She had looked, by every rational measure, appropriate. Respectable. Clerical.
And yet.
And yet.
Miss.
It wasn’t cruelty. It wasn’t even inaccuracy, not really. It was something deeper.
Recognition, perhaps. Or misrecognition so intimate it bordered on prophecy. A glimpse of something she tried so hard to both suppress and reveal.
And in that moment, before he blanched, before the apology, before anything else—she had felt seen. In the wrong way, yes.But also in a way she could not completely reject.
“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” — 1 Corinthians 13:12
She doesn’t know if Paul meant what she thinks he meant. But there’s something in that verse that clings to her ribs—something about being seen, truly seen, without needing to explain. Without needing to earn the right to be.
Of course, when she turned around and their eyes met, his face went white. He blinked, stammered, and flushed from his ears to his collar.
“Oh God—I’m so sorry, I— Father. I mean, Father, of course. I didn’t—”
She simply smiled and nodded, completely ignoring whatever else she had to say. She moved through the line, grabbed her food, and sat down, far away in the corner where no one would bother her.
Except, of course, Al did.
He raced right after her and continued to apologize.
Then: “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
She nodded, and he sat down and talked her ear off for the rest of the meal, and then more in the hallways—and that was that. Their genesis.
And hers.