If you have been hurt by someone, the idea of trusting someone…can seem impossible. I know that you want to believe that there is an easier way to do this, alone. And chances are, you have already tried to do this alone. I am guessing you have tried almost anything and everything to avoid the journey you are now on.
————-——Gretchen Schmelzer, Journey Through Trauma
IF I HAD TO DESCRIBE THE TRUTH of those nights when he knocked on my door, it would be that I’d been walking down a dark corridor for many weeks, months, and then, without my knowing why, each night someone began to place a single lit candle in front of me.
I was an undergraduate, living a college-organized nomad’s life across Europe for a term. On my first morning, I read from John’s Gospel, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” It felt like a prophecy, the way my life would go. Something I could accept, because it would make meaning. Whatever I wrote in journals from that period, I burned. I understood that no fortifying wisdom would come from the prolonged wretchedness I was in. I had gotten into a bad situation with someone back in America. I regarded what I’d been dealt as a thing that had caught on some ugly protuberance in my character, and so I believed that the situation, the pain, could never be fully escaped, and certainly not in Europe. I wanted no one to know of it.
That term, I would finish my public life in the early evening, light with laughter. Then, alone, I would somehow uncork a bottle of wine with my thumb and a ballpoint pen. Once the room’s corners dimmed, I would retire to the standing shower, letting hot water rain down until I felt I’d be able to sleep.
Over the semester’s weeks, Christopher and I had recognized affinities for similar things, had exchanged friendly barbs while waiting our turn at the hostel coffee pot. He had a way of nodding that let me know he knew more about me than I was willing to say, and that was something I found comforting at the time, as I didn’t want to say a thing. Still, I had not anticipated the knocking.
There was no real greeting that I remember, though I can see him standing there, never leaning against the doorjamb or the wall of the hallway. It was usually between midnight and three. Even if he’d had a drink, there was no want or need in him that would cause him to lean, no reason to telegraph a weakness. We channeled our Midwestern stoicism at all hours. I see him now, taller than me, facing my door with the hallway’s dimmed evening light casting shadows in his white-blond curls, and we would walk down the hall and sit on the sofas in the lobby or walk the streets of the arrondissement, past corner markets, the occasional inebriate. These are not sophisticated evenings I’m conjuring. Frequently I wore a pair of sweatpants from my high school volleyball team that read Z-Kat in puffy paint across the rear. I never dressed for the visits, though I knew they were coming. I would always wash and get ready for bed. I would put on pajamas. I slept for a while. But when the knock came, I would go to the door, we would talk about taking a bit of air, and then we would walk.
I don’t remember what we talked about. He had a long-term girlfriend whom he would call in the afternoons from the phone in the lobby. I was envious of the daytime ease, the regularity, the unmasked quality of those long, semipublic conversations when I compared them to my own tortuous calls, which I tried to disguise with soft tones when anyone approached. We did not talk about his girlfriend, who would later become his wife, and then his widow—because that is how his story went, and I found out too late. He did not ask, directly, about what was so clearly consuming me. But we did talk. We kept at the talking, as though we knew we needed the exercise. We knew we needed to do that. It was not small talk. It was quiet, and always in the dark morning hours, and rarely was another person awake.
This is about a pin Christopher dropped in time, these moments that fortified me when I felt I could hardly pull myself forward, the quiet nights that shed light into much that passed and followed. And—wait—that is one thing we talked about. Christopher loved the stars. He’d been confused when I asked what light pollution was, concerned, perhaps, that I couldn’t determine when there was too much scattered to see something real, when there was too much trouble to be able to read the stars.
Twenty years later, I was in too much trouble to be able to read the stars, and I had been struggling through it for nearly that long. That is how it happens in these stories: once one thing happens, other things tend to happen. It becomes an atmosphere, even when nothing is happening.
A former Carthusian monk appeared in the pattern of my days. I want to use the word enigmatic here, though I don’t yet know whether to apply it to the person, the relationship, or the appearance. The president of the university we worked for had died suddenly, unexpectedly, on a pilgrimage in Rome. The circumstances were so unbelievable that people wandered the campus in midsummer on the day of his services, uncertain of where they belonged. This man and I roamed with them.
“Do you want to go to mass?” he asked. “I’d kind of like to go to mass with you.”
“Is this a test?” I asked. I did not consider myself a Catholic, despite being enough of a Catholic for him to consider me one.
“It might be.”
Mass was in the wide basement of a campus building, and though there were folding chairs set out for a hundred, only ten people were spread out across them: a father and son, a young man with a thick gold chain, a short woman with a knitted scarf wrapped around her head. A few others. It had been a long time since I’d attended mass, and this one lasted all of fifteen minutes. As we left, he dipped his hand in the holy water and held this hand out to me until I touched my fingers to his.
And another period of walking began.
We talked through trust. Meaning, why I didn’t, why one might never. The church was included in this, which meant men were included, which meant he, too, was included.
I do not think these walks would have happened, would be happening, if he’d been a former priest. This was a man who’d recently said that, if he had to choose between expertise and admiration, he would choose admiration. Meaning, he would choose to admire.
Christopher would arrive at my door each night like a lit candle. This other man led me to an altar and stood nearby, watching as I lit one candle, and then led me to another altar, elsewhere, and another, and more, watching me light flames against my uncertainty.
I’d been a house with one open window, until he threw open another, and all things stuck began to stir.
Katherine Zlabek’s story collection When (Ohio State) is the winner of The Journal’s 2018 Non/Fiction Collection Prize. Her work has appeared in Boulevard, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and other journals.
Photo by Meizhi Lang on Unsplash
