Giornale #1

Her skirt swishes against the cobblestone and her habit trails behind her as she sways toward the basilica entrance, hands folded in prayer.  Despite the glaring sunlight, she wraps her fleece tighter around her willow frame as she continues her solo trek to the basilica.  Her cross glints against her periwinkle cloth, her divine armor against the secular world.  She strides across the piazza, oblivious to the chattering tourists surrounding her with iPhones and tour guides.  She is determined to see her bridegroom and savior and command plow through the crowds with the strength only her faith gives her.  The life of a Roman nun never appealed to her as a teenager.  She used to scoff at the sandal-clad women walking by as she drank full bottles of wine, slumped in the streets or vomiting in a back alley while her friends passed wrapped papers of whatever the street offered to them that day.  She found shallow pleasure in kissing random strangers in puddles of cigarette ash and mud, her dress inching slower to the ground while men’s hands groped her flesh in their desperate bid to conquer.  She felt no pleasure, only the dry nausea of another night spent delaying her own pain.  It wasn’t until she stumbled into a nearby church after a long night of tequila shots and snorts of cocaine that she started to feel some sense of peace.  The breathless quiet, coupled with the scent of incense and lavender perfume, helped to keep her nausea at bay.  Sitting in the wooden pew, the soft touch of a nun’s hand against her back, she felt a calmness inside her, strange and foreign but also insatiable.  She had found her new high.  She donned the habit and modest dress a year later, shedding her uniform of jeans and t-shirts, and adorning herself with a simple cross.  The old girl living her life by the drop of a bottle and the flare of the match was gone, replaced by a pious soldier of Christ.

Church of the Gesu 5/23