MY FOX
It's hard to walk away, to give up again.
I'm an expert in leaving, a professional.
Whom I can't bear or change, I leave.
Parents, brother, friends. Foxes.
I try to hide behind a mask, one lasting two thousand years, such a long time to believe it is safe and strong.
The gigantic institution behind it supports it.
When I abandon something, I'm serious. My work, my satisfying work with that good income to spend for pleasures and little vices. My comfy little rented flat. My dark city suits, too.
A uniform is like the other, its meaning, not its nature, that gives a sense of belonging and identity.
So no more sniffing and drinking nights in pubs and trendy bars with the usual bunch of fiends and a series of new girls every month.
Meet, shag, dump, it was our style.
An endless circle.
When I woke up in a strange bed, close to a red haired woman and with a throbbing head, in full daylight, I got up to pee and fell hard on the floor, my legs failing me
I woke again in a hospital bed with a bend around my temples and what the nurse told me was a collection of shattered glass cuts all over my face.
A helpful fall, a day to reflect in hospital and two more at home, my swollen face too ugly to be seen by people.
It was Easter, I walked along London empty streets, out of tourist route.
The open church door tempted me, it was starting to rain and I left my hat home, it pressed on my forehead too much.
Silence greeted me, no crowds, no phones, no music and laughs.
Something forgotten or barely used from my past, the religion, so I stayed, for a very long time, until a man dressed in a black vest came to me and said he had to close the doors, but we could share a nice cup of tea in his office.
Two months after I entered the seminar.
The sacrifice - was it really so? - to forget my former life, to enter into a new world was admired required, appreciated by the teachers.
And mine was a big one, not like some of the young seminarians who joined in their late teens, unaware of the temptation I've experimented fully.
There was a man around sixty in our group, a widow two with grown up children, who stared at me often and once asked me if I was sure, really sure.
He took off the pictures of his three grandchildren and enquired me if I was ready to give up also that possibility.
I listened him carefully, promised to think about all the stuff he was implying and politely dismissed him.
My quest for peace was stronger than the celibacy problem. But with the share of women I've had, on the edge between meaninglessness and repetition, nothing new, nothing exciting, I was past the lust part.
A few years of peace, my work with the people at the bottom of the society in my first assignment as an assistant, East End. A constantly growing collection of books as faithful companion.
My eloquence made me shine with the bosses and my first parish was a middle class suburb, mainly young and old people to deal with.
I worked, I ate, I slept and I thought the worst was behind me.
Until she appeared, her mind immediately got mine.
Banter and dialogues, a rebel lock of dark hair and a guinea pig in the little cafè, my G&T renewed supply just for her.
How I could avoid her, a few days before the second marriage of her father?
It was harmless between us, only an intellectual challenge and a ... kiss.
It meant nothing, it had to be so.
A moment of confusion, of loneliness, the absence of a human contact for a very long time.
She told me about her life, there were fragments of the former life I had, before. And so no light touch of lips, but tongues, teeth and lips fighting for contact and control.
And I walked away, hands in my hair, kneeling again later on my bedroom carpet, in front of the cross, praying until my knees became insensible and my back ached.
In bed, sleep conquered me soon. I surrendered to the night
It was safe and logical, a confession in the morning with my spiritual teacher and I'd be forgiven.
And I woke at dawn, turning in bed, rolling on the mattress with a pounding heart and a part of my body wanting a release that was not mechanical, like sometimes happens in the morning
I missed air, missed breath, missed her.
My morning was a long run after mass, to clean my body, no time to confess, I still had to process it, to find again my daily path.
I realized my surrendering the moment I saw the lingerie under her coat.
Lace, expensive, charming, sexy.
She has to be mine, a man with a woman, again, all the desire, need and lust a body can have for another.
A night, and the day after was confusion, fear, insecurity,
Performing a marriage, thinking about commitments, thinking about the grandchildren of the old seminarian, thinking about a thin little girl with dark hair calling me dad.
I could not regret our night, but to get back to that world, the one I already refused, the world of the common people, was scaring the hell out of me, metaphorically.
A house, a work, a car, a mortgage, a wife, a kid, a dog.
The sequence is perfect.
And if it had been a bout of passion only, nothing deeper, longer, stronger to make us face the world?
She's like me in some ways, sex as her way to cope with the worst days of life.
We're not ready, we can hurry up things and ruin them, can't we?
But I love her and she loves me; I told her a lie, that it will pass.
A month without sleeping well, her face in my mind all night.
Choosing God it the right or the easy way?
I could try to see her again, maybe do a quiet dating – better call it "priest dating"– to see how we go from here, if it is time to take a life changing decision again.
Thunders and lightning outside, foxes aren't out this evening, the path is safe.
I grab my coat and umbrella and head for her house.