Grip - Drizzle (chapter 3) by Kelsey Schur

Christian

The church is situated at the center of our Catholic campus where the lawn slopes up the hill to meet the slate steps up to the doors. It's a relatively new building. The old church isn't big enough to fit the needs of our overpopulated campus. I've discovered that the main hall is typically refreshingly empty during the summer semester, but to say a Catholic church is ever truly empty is absurd. With Mary, Jesus, and their entire entourage staring at you from every column and recess, how can anyone be expected to get any real reflection accomplished?
This is one of the reasons I never sit in the church proper, the other reason being that I'm a private person and all of the nuns floating in and out make me nervous. If you turn to the left directly after the main entrance, there's an unlabeled door that belies itself to be a closet. Behind it is the university's concession to other religions, a ten by fifteen foot white-walled room with four tall windows in the wall opposite the door. Inside the room are four spare pews, which fill the first half of the room, leaving the other half of the room directly before the windows empty. Except for the gold highlighted chair rail along the wall, the room is entirely unadorned, and I like it this way. Usually, I'm the only person here, except at certain times of the day I have run into the two Muslim students in our entire school, a few Buddhists, and a blonde girl who sits in the corner and sobs nearly every Tuesday night. God doesn't bring me here. I meditate for myself, and occasionally scribble a few lines of poetry.
It's still raining outside; it has been for the past week. I slump heavily into the second pew from the front and close my eyes, sighing heavily, almost expecting myself to melt onto the floor. It's so wonderfully silent in here, so different from the lab. Listening to Kassandra and Al bicker and antagonize each other relentlessly is exhausting, even though I've so far stayed entirely uninvolved. Even when they're not speaking, it's like sitting in a box with two vipers, tense, hoods fanned, frozen into holding each other on their respective sides of the room by gaze alone. Except of course when AL makes one of his pathetic moves on Kassandra and gets stung. I want to pity them both, but I can't. Feeling empathy for Kassandra is like trying to feel for a sea urchin, and everytime Al rolls back to his desk with his tail between his legs, he's brought it on himself.. But I can't think about them now. Straightening myself on the pew, I exhale thoroughly, and rest my gaze on the window. It's raining again today. Patterns of brilliance and grey pass over the panes, water running down the outside of the glass. The grey shapes slowly coalesce, like an amoeba, like watching shifting cloud shapes... a shape... a shape I know?

I hear a human voice, female... it's not speaking. Laughing or crying? Crying. Is it the blonde girl? No, she's not here. Where is here? Not the church side-room. There's nothing here, just greyness, murky grey. No, no, someone, that feeling when someone enters a room from a door you can't see. A presence in my blind spot. It's damp, clammy, wet all around me; is it the room or that thing?
“Hello?”
I try to look around, but I can't tell if I'm even turning because it's all one uniform grey space. Then something, someone! A person, a person is right before me, conversational distance. A woman.
“Hello? Why are you crying?”
The woman, a young woman, pale with long brown hair, dripping wet, shaking with sobs or cold or both, answers without lifting her gaze from the ground. “...He took our life away from me.”
“I'm afraid I don't understand.”
“He was a fool. Now we're... he and I... are apart. Alone,” she tries to explain.
I still don't understand. A break-up of some kind? “I'm sorry.” It's all I can really say.
“Why?” she asks, still not lifting her eyes, but there's an insistence in her voice.
“Why? Why what?”
She makes no reply, nor moves.
“Why am I sorry?” I guess. “Uh, well, it sounds really sad.”
She makes no sign of whether or not I've answered the right question. “Will you help me?”
“Help you with what?”
“Help me fix it,” she continues ambiguously.
“Fix what?”
“The way I feel.”
I hesitate, what does she want? Comfort? “Uhm, I can try.”
The sobbing, crying, silences. There is silence. There is breathing, my breathing, the clinging moisture, her unmoving, presence, existence. Slowly, she lifts her chin and eyes, large, round, brown eyes, childlike in their unscrutinizing stare, but opaque and muddy with tears. I cannot hold her intense, imploring look, but I cannot turn away-

And then she, her eyes, that place evaporates, and I'm seated again, back on the hard pew in the sterile, immediate church side-room. Did I fall asleep? I must have. Bizarre dream. I scold myself. I never fall asleep during meditation. Maybe I'm just exhausted, things have been stressful. My back aches, insisting that I move, so I stand and twist, cracking my back. It's brighter in the room than it was when I dozed off. The sun must have finally come out.