My ex-girlfriend – a lame phrase for what she’s become for me – came back to Norwich over the Whitsun weekend to visit old friends. She had a window for me on Saturday. In the Boar she told me she was engaged to the man she’d left me for. I steadied myself for days of confusion. Might be weeks, I thought, as we talked and I introduced her to whoever was at the bar.
At Pentecost mass the next morning, I slipped into the harsh habits of mind that drove her away in the first place. It was as if no time had passed, no spiritual progress had been made. I judged people in the congregation in the same way I would have back then. I couldn’t master the envy and bile, even while the reader read from Acts about the Spirit coming down on the apostles and speaking to the people in their own tongues. Heavenly things were paper-thin in comparison. Churchgoing these past few years was a pastime. The gift of tears was laughable. Strange how easily the eternal becomes a mere idea when some old wound opens.
Then, walking home, the old feeling of absence. There was almost a pull to it, something like real evil: the mind turning in on itself, what they used to call the devil’s work. I’d have left too, in her place.
*
It’s been years now, says Rob. Get over it. It’s clearly done. Time heals, then time heals again. Some clichés are true, he says. Just go to church, if that’s where you say life is.
Notes from a Room 