Page 78 of The Warmth of Our Closest Star

“Talk soon?”

“Talk soon.”

Then he disappeared from my screen. Alex’s words rang in my ears as I sat there, wondering how many times I’d done something to sabotage my happiness. Obviously, not everything that happens to a person is their fault. How one deals with the events of their life, and what they do to cope with it is. Knowing that still didn’t help me pull myself out of the depths of despair I’d found myself in, even if I was pretending everything was okay.

I’d need to make another therapy appointment. We’d gotten nowhere quickly, my therapist and I, but eventually we’d have to stumble upon something.

Something important had happened though, which I didn’t realize until I had called my therapist’s office and set up an appointment. Alex had referred to me as a friend. Without making a joke about it.

We didn’t have to talk about Peter. He’d made himself clear.

That was the thing about Alex. Sometimes you had to pay close attention, but there was a plethora of answers in everything he said.

Paris Is Burning

Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris was ablaze.

Typically, I’d take my mid-morning break at my little office space in my apartment at my desk. I’d flip through web pages and snack on hummus and veggies or a snack that was decidedly less healthy. What kind of breakfast food are you? Take a quiz to find that out. The ten things you never knew about jellyfish. That’s something I definitely had to check out. The news. That’s where the headline got my attention.

Shuffling like a zombie from my office space, down the hall, and into the living room, I turned on the television. In real-time, I watched a symbol of my religion burn.

It must be saved!

What a tragedy!

This happened because of the sinners.

Those sinners were listed.

Straight white men were not on the list.

I watched as cardinals and priests pleaded with…the world…to do better. To care about what was happening in Paris. To realize this was all of the heathens’ fault.

They begged people to care about a building more than I’d ever heard them plead with people to care for the sick. Feed and clothe the homeless. Stop wars and violence. To love instead of hate. Their pleas for a building were greater than any they’d made for people to help them identify the perverts within their own ranks who preyed on children.

Their pleas over something that was no more than a pile of stones, steel, and glass fell on deaf ears in my living room.

Catholicism, I suddenly realized, meant nothing to me. Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris meant less to me. It was a beautiful building. Beautiful buildings don’t last forever.

Without my family, a religion I’d been tied to simply by birth, felt no more significant to me than a thread I plucked from the cuff of my shirt and tossed away.

What had Catholicism done for me—Enzo? Had it protected my family from disease and pain? From death? Had it comforted me when I grieved, weeping and sobbing alone in my Montreal apartment at night? Had it protected my brother and sister when the world was cruel to them? Did it guide the hearts and souls of its holy men who told me that I was sick for being gay? Or their flock who found Noe and Ila intolerable during services?

Had it put food on my table?

Had it kept me warm when winter came?

Had it provided me with a coat?

Decent shoes?

Guidance when my marriage was falling apart because something so big was going on inside of me that I couldn’t even begin to understand it?

My marriage was an abomination to the Catholic church.

Nothing. Catholicism had done nothing. Except ask for money so that a building could be rebuilt so the church’s coffers could go undisturbed.

At one time, even when there was no food in my pantry, I had no coat, and my shoes had holes in the soles, I would have given what I could to help.