Just Like That

Smoking is not allowed here, Sir.’ A voice broke the silence from somewhere on the right.

William took another drag of his half-finished cigarette, blew the smoke out slowly and then turned in the direction of the voice. The voice belonged to a middle-aged nun who did not look directly at him partly because of her training but mostly because she was naturally shy. William took just one look at her and put the cigarette back to his lips. In that instant he wished he had been that rebellious years before in high school. But he had been training himself for the Seminary and the reverence he had felt for robed people was unbelievable.

Casually pointing in the general direction of the old chapel that stood unimposingly in the centre of a well- kept compound, serene even in the bright mid-afternoon sunshine, William spoke. “She was my girlfriend for a very long time. We knew each other better than we knew ourselves. And now this…” His words trailed off when the tone in his voice registered in his brain. He sounded pathetic, the sole attendee of his own pity party.

The nun looked a little confused for a moment and cast a cursory glance in the same direction that his finger had pointed.

“Are you here for the wedding or were you here for the funeral?” She asked.

William chuckled before blowing out another cloud of smoke with his answer.

“For me it is pretty much the same thing right now. But not the funeral.” There it was again. The pity.

“I see…” the nun said in a measured way, careful to not sound insincere. But that was the thing; she couldn’t see why he was in the compound to begin with. Why on earth would he attend such a wedding? “So what exactly brought you here today?” She finally asked, wary of unbecoming drama. Maybe he was as deranged as some of the villains she had seen in those strange Hollywood movies; the ones that ruined the wedding by escaping with the bride or worse still, came and harmed someone.

“I think I hoped one of us would die before today. Either him or her or me. I can’t decide.”

“And you are not planning on killing anyone, I hope?” Her round eyes widened with discernible fright. William smiled, tickled by her facial expression and smoked the last of his cigarette. “It is never that serious.” He pressed the burning end of the stub against the stone wall he was leaning against and flung what remained of the cigarette into the rosebush on his left.

The nun sighed in relief and sat on one of the stairs leading into the old parish office. Her mind wandered away for a moment as she watched the bits of ash get gently blown off the stone wall by a breeze so slight it was impossible to know it had passed. The Bible said the same thing about people. From ashes we were created and to ashes we would return. Her fear was always that just like the ash that had been blown away by a breeze nobody could feel, so would many lives be snuffed out without a trace, gone forever.

Nobody was in the parish office. The wedding was the last scheduled event for the day and the rest of the nuns would be coming in bright and early the next day to prepare the chapel for regular Sunday service. The priest had asked her to lock up as he had an urgent matter to attend to somewhere nearby. There was no real way of saying no to him. He was far too charming to encourage rejection.

“The thing I cannot get past is how many times she said she loved me. It is the only thing I can hear in my mind. I now don’t know if she really loved me or I imagined all those things.” William’s voice wedged its way into her thoughts. She looked away from the spot on the wall and regarded him fully. He must have been about 40; his age accounting for his maturity in not making a scene but also being the social death knell whose twisted probity ensured he had to attend perhaps the most painful event of his adult life to date. He lit another cigarette and she suppressed her objection; his vice was clearly also his relief.

“It is possible that she did love you when she said those things. Lies do not always repeat themselves in the same way. If she said she did and your heart heard it the same way every time she said it, then she probably meant it.”

“How do you know?”

“I always check everything against how God loves us. In my life it is that simple.”

“Just like that?”

The nun nodded, “Yes, just like that.”

“I don’t think you understand what I mean then. And it is fine. You are a nun.” There was an air of dismissiveness in the way he said it that made her feel slightly defensive. He had only stated the facts but yet she felt offended.

“Love is one of the most basic things to understand. You only have to know what it looks like.”

William kept smoking, desperate but unwilling to shut her up even though he felt he knew where the conversation was going. He could hear the list from the Bible; patient, kind, no record of wrongs, blah blah blah. Hell, he had just heard it in the first part of the service he had extricated himself from after discreetly flashing a box of cigarettes to his friends as his excuse to leave.

“It is consistent and unselfish. Love cannot be confused with anything else.” The way she said it made him look at her for the first time and see that she was an actual woman, not a creature in a habit with a concealed emotional thermostat perpetually set to ‘Holy’. She was not unattractive either. Her face simply wore the calm acceptance that a life of unbending routine eventually created. She was bored and it toned down the once perky features of her face into plain and unremarkable ones.

“You have been in love before.” He stated it with the certainty of someone ready to input dates and times to prove it.

“You do not understand; my whole life is about love. But I know what you mean, and you are right. I was once in love with someone and that went predictably.” She giggled.

“Badly?”

“Well, I did end up in a Convent.” They both laughed.

“But that’s not how I mean it. He helped me get here. I chose this life. Sometimes you have to see what love is not before you gain the competence to identify it for what it is.”

The end of William’s cigarette drew flaming red-orange zig zags in the air when he gestured. “In short you are saying she loved me but there is a huge BUT in there somewhere.”

“I am not saying anything to you that you do not already know. There is, after all, a wedding going on and you are not in it.” She shrugged gently.

The nun was right. Something had been off for a long while. William started remembering the times when there were tears but he could not understand what had caused them. There were also times when he had gone away for breathing space, nobody else knowing where he was or what he was up to. In his mind that is exactly what breathing space was: time away, alone with no interruptions. He shook his head when he remembered the time he had taken a trip and only remembered to tell her about it five full days later upon his return. He always suspected he had mentioned it to her at some point but could never be absolutely certain that this had happened. Between her screaming at him and his defending himself, there was very little space for normal, informative conversation. In his defence he had left his phone at home on his night stand where it always was when he was indoors so he did not know why, much less how, she had even tried to reach him. Shortly afterwards paranoia settled in as a fully- fledged member of their relationship. There were unfounded accusations about another woman. William would laugh those off because he had been unable to really look at other women and feel the same way he did for her. But she was having none of it. Soon he got tired of defending himself and let her run with whatever theory satisfied her suspicions. Some of them were rather entertaining and he listened to them as a child would to campfire stories; wide eyed and enthralled. And then she had gone silent. At first he thought she was coming to terms with her crazy theories. He came home late one day from work and all her things were gone. He only realised it when he started looking for her cocoa butter body oil after his shower. He loved its homely aroma and the way it made his skin feel after a long day. It was absolutely nowhere, and neither was anything else.

‘Ah, she needs some space too. Let me let her breathe.’ He had thought to himself, glad that she was finally borrowing a leaf from him and doing something for herself that did not involve both her imagination and her blood pressure. But then a week turned into a month and by the second month he had not even known where to start looking for her.

Perhaps he had been the problem? The thought snuck into his reminiscences and startled him.

“It was me.” The pity was replaced by surprise.

A few musical notes sailed towards them from the chapel. Great is Thy Faithfulness was playing on the organ. The wedding ceremony was almost complete. In about ten minutes the wedding party would march out of the chapel to the Wedding March amidst ululations and William would be expected to form the number of people cheering on the couple, wishing them good luck and all the best in life even though he had secretly wanted nothing of the sort.

After a little thought, the nun said “Many, many times it takes two to make a relationship but just one to break it. So, take what you have learnt and make the next relationship better.”

She stood up and smoothed the back of her skirt. William raised himself from the languid and defeated leaning posture he had employed since the conversation started.

“I think I will let the lesson sit for a while. I am not ready.” He said this more to himself than to her but she caught it and smiled weakly.

“Take all the time you need. Just remember to breathe.”

They stood in silence, each one contemplating their next move, wondering how to do it without rushing the inevitable, but savouring the moment in which perfect strangers had had a conversation that had refocused their thoughts.

He looked at the rose bushes. There were some lovely flowers in there but even though he had always had some appreciation for the beauty of flowers, he could never work around the thorns that jealously guarded the roses so he usually let them sit pretty until they died. In that very moment the roses had felt like his relationship.

“You still have not told me why you felt it necessary to attend this wedding.” The nun said, curiosity tilting her head to one side, causing her habit to fold a little.

“I had to. The groom is my Boss.”