#sucks isolde into the lantern

[chainedwarden]

My wife liked lanterns : (

"I'm sure she'd like mine." He would put them both in there if he could get the chance.

[jomiddlemarch]

I give myself this advice

It’s not that she wished she’d met him in the past, before he was a priest. Christ, what a bloody mess that would have been, because she would have been less insightful, the word the therapist loved to use, and mostly focused on finding out whether his cock could deliver what his eyes (his beautiful eyes!) promised and he would have been more drunk, less charming, and probably would have worn a suit that was cut too close to read as professional or a leather jacket that tried too hard.  It’s not that she thought there was some world in the multiverse where they met in a bar or a coffee-shop (not hers, not guinea-pig-themed or scattered with frenetic polka dots or velvet loveseats), it’s not that she imagined them meeting at uni and fumbling around until they realized it was True Love and he/she couldn’t take that job in Brussels and ever be happy. She didn’t, it wasn’t her fault if she dreamt about it and the little snakeskin valise she’d shove in the back of a cupboard when she decided they’d never be apart.

It’s not that Boo never met him, unless the Lord was a lot more conniving than she thought based on the liturgy and the Quakers. She might be wrong, He’d convinced a bunch of men to swoon over silk-velvet chasubles and beanies they gave a name to that wasn’t a beanie. It’s not that her mother never met him and her stepmother had, calling him Father, Father as if otherwise no one would remember he was a priest. It’s not that she couldn’t be satisfied by another man or by an evening out (not in) with Belinda. It wasn’t even that she desired him, though she did, fuck she did and for good reason, that voice in her ear, the tone like he’d call her a slag and he called her A rúnsearc and she didn’t even know what it meant except she was sure it was something pure, something tender like his eyes watching her, all the while giving her the most perfect seeing-to in the history of seeing-tos, his body hard and sleek against hers. She’d considered, briefly, offering to become a nun, Heloising his Abelard, before deciding the castration fouled it all up and she’d look like a hipster raven in a habit and worse without one.

She loved him and he loved her and she wished, wished and not prayed, that they could find each other again because the odds that they’d find anyone else as perfectly matched as a glove to its mate beggared belief. She could not put herself to sleep thinking of how it might happen, because it was something beyond inconceivable. Foolish, dizzy. Deluded. Shameful, not because he was a Catholic priest, but because it was too romantic, melodramatic, idealistic. She was not Isolde or anyone like, streaming long hair, glossy without shampoo, eyes like candles or lanterns or some rot. She was crude and crudely made. There was only the hint of the divine around her elbows and her eyelashes, the break in her voice when she pleaded for his help and when she wept, as quietly as she could, for missing Boo. For Claire going away. For small tits in a large-tits world. He loved that woman, God help him except that was the one fucking thing God refused to help him with, so bloody fucking suck it Jesus. Jaysus, that’s how he said it, his accent sneaking out though he didn’t blush for it.

He told her to stay away from his church so she did. She went back to the Quaker meeting and there were different people, a woman in a long woolly mauve cardigan and a couple of old people who resembled each other so much she couldn’t decide if they were lovers or twins.  She sat in the silence and waited for the Light to come, to pin her like a butterfly in a Victorian case. She sat and the silence was enough without the Light. In the silence, she was a woman he could find his way to again, a woman who could say something if he found his way to her again.

“I miss my lover but I miss my friend more. If I had a choice, I’d choose her. Boo. That’s her name, I’m not trying to scare anyone. I wonder, I wonder whether happiness is real,” she said. “I pretend and no one says I’m lying.”

It was Quaker meeting. No one answered. He wasn’t there, so he didn’t say anything when they walked out together. He didn’t whisper her name in the middle of the night, against her throat. He might. He might and she clung to that, even though she shouldn’t and he’d understand why she wanted to. She’d hold him in her arms if she got the chance again and know it was the closest she came to sheltering his pilgrim soul.

His pilgrim soul. Christ, he’d fucking bloody love that and tell her so. He’d think she was the rose of the world, Rosamundi, Yeats and punk rock and Henry II’s slut. He’d laugh, such a dirty, lovely sound. He’d know exactly who she was.

Perhaps one day. One day in April, May, November. After the ice melted. After the roses bloomed too early, confusing the bees in the rectory garden. Perhaps it wouldn’t be too late. She wouldn’t call it a wish nor a prayer; she’d press her hands against her heart and hold it there. The holding it was enough, she’d learned that from him, though he wasn’t her teacher and she wasn’t a student.