C.M. Green
The Lover
Week one: You skip Mass.
Week two: You stand outside the doors of the Church at 11:07. It’s not too late; they probably haven’t even started the Liturgy of the Word yet. You could still go in. It just felt so good last week not to. Not to feel trapped for an hour like a rat in a maze. Not to worry that everyone could hear your thoughts. Not to think at all, actually. At 11:14, you turn away and walk home.
Week three: You try going to a different church, one where you’ve heard the priest is liberal and people can wear leggings and piercings. You sit through the readings and the homily, but when the gifts are brought to the front, and the Liturgy of the Eucharist begins, you slip out and sit in your car for the rest of the hour. You listen to NPR and the news is bad in Florida. When the crowd comes out of the church into the parking lot, you pull away quickly and head for your coffee shop where your coworker knows that you want an iced Americano. At a table by the window, you try to read, but you know something now: skipping Mass once is an accident and a mortal sin. Skipping Mass three times is a pattern.
Week four: You sleep in and cry when you realize you missed Mass again. You could go to a later service, somewhere in the city, but you don’t.
Week five: You get an early breakfast with your sister. She asks you how the new job is going, and she looks a little disappointed when you say you love it. “Brendan says they’re always hiring at his work,” she offers. He works in consulting, though who he consults and on what topic you’ve never figured out. Your sister practiced law until her third child was born, and she has always hoped you might do what she did not. She’s like your parents, in a way, except they are in Florida enjoying retirement and seldom talk to you. Your sister talks to you all the time. She has to leave by 9:30 so that she can take her children to Mass, and she says one more time, “There are tons of good jobs out there. You don’t have to stay where you are.”
Week eight: You pick up a closing shift for a coworker, and you and the manager are alone. He starts a long conversation about romance because he’s trying to figure out if he even wants to date. You tell him, “I don’t think dating is for me. People just don’t like me like that.” He pushes and digs and when you tell him you’re Catholic, or ex-Catholic, or sort of Catholic, he snaps his fingers. “It all makes sense now.” As you clean the espresso machine at the end of the night, he offers to set you up with a friend if you ever want. You think he probably knows very cool people. All your friends in college were Catholic and most of them looked the same, like white girls out of Invisalign commercials. It’s nice, working at the coffee shop, to see that people arrange their lives in myriad ways. It’s nice, too, to see that not everyone is straight.
Week eleven: Struck by something you at first call divine, you go to Confession. You sit behind the screen; you aren’t ready to look anyone in the eye and say this. “Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. It has been about five months since my last Confession.” You run through the list for him: lust, pride, avarice. He wants details, and you give him some but retain others. You tell him, for example, about wanting to strangle your sister last week when she sent you a four-paragraph email explaining why she thinks you should have a real job, but you don’t tell him about touching yourself and imagining St. Sebastian shot through with arrows. You tell him that you haven’t been to Mass in almost three months, but you don’t tell him why. He says, “Well, the place to start would be to go to Mass tomorrow. Jesus is still waiting for you, ready to forgive you if you want to be forgiven. Do you want that?” You say, “Yes,” so you make your Act of Contrition and he absolves you of your sins. A small part of you feels cleaner, but most of you is left wondering why a priest should have this power. Why God is so limited. Guilt for everything you didn’t say pumps through your body like a steroid in your blood stream.
Week fourteen: You go to a Methodist service, but it doesn’t feel real without the Eucharist.
Week fifteen: It’s the Triduum. You decide you’ll go to Mass on Easter, at least to please your sister. On Holy Thursday, in the shower, you wash your own feet and for the first time in almost a year, you pray. “What do you want from me?” You say it over and over until you’re crying, because it feels like you are screaming into a jagged silent cavern. The next day, you listen to Johnny Cash and the Carter Sisters sing “Were you there when they crucified my lord.” You want to feel what you used to feel about this, a real grief, mourning for a friend. Instead, only numbness. But on Easter Sunday, you go back to church. As soon as you step in, your chest constricts and your eyes burn and your thoughts spin faster and faster and you think Oh, I am a sinner, a queer dyke fag slut cunt sinner who will go to hell and suffer eternally because I am ungrateful and how many evil, evil things have I done this week alone and I need to stay here to be saved but the cost of salvation is to feel like this and I don’t know how to stand that. You don’t hear a single word the priest says as you sit certain that you are irredeemable. When it’s time for the Eucharist, you don’t go up to take it because you know you aren’t worthy, but how can you be unworthy of something that isn’t real, but even thinking it isn’t real is a sin so you must be damned. When Mass is finally over you almost run to your car because you have been holding back sobs for an hour and fifteen minutes and you finally release them, turn the radio up louder and there’s more bad news but you can’t hear it over your own weeping.
Week eighteen: You finally let your manager set you up with his friend, your first date in almost two years. He’s a little older, a little taller, beautiful but boring. You should like him, because he has a real job and he’s nice and your coworker thinks you’re perfect for each other. But when he looks at you, you feel like you are something you are not. It’s like you’re sitting in Church. He tells you a long anecdote about a chemistry experiment gone wrong and you laugh at the right places. At the end, he walks you to your car and says, “I’d love to do this again.” He leans down and kisses you, your first kiss since college, and your skin feels like it will crack and release something toxic if he doesn’t stop touching you this second.
Week twenty-two: You get a promotion at the coffee shop, shift manager, and you text your sister, excited to share the news. Her reply is enthusiastic but you know what she really thinks. You wonder if she’s right, if you should find a job with a salary, but you can’t bring yourself to even look. For the first time you understand your work. You enjoy the act of creation, of being productive in a literal sense. And the coffee shop is the first place you have ever known people who feel like your mirror.
Week twenty-four: You aren’t a hermit, so you know trans people exist, but this is your first time really hanging out with one. You met her at work, where she’s become a regular, and she asks you on a date while you’re talking after your shift one day. She suggests a hike, so you drive out of the city a little and meet at a trail that disappears into the woods. It’s the best date you’ve ever been on, your first date with a girl. The conversation is easy and light and then easy and deep. You tell her a little about church, how you stopped going months ago now. She’s Jewish and tells you a bit about her own experience. “I like asking questions. I never want to take the first answer I come to.” When you reach the end of the trail, you stand on an outcropping above the river. She says, “Can I kiss you?” and you freeze. No one has ever asked you that. She smiles, soft and kind, and says, “It’s okay. We don’t have to.” But before you part ways, before she gets in her car, you say, “I think I’d like that kiss.” And it feels warm and grounding, and you think you can never see her again.
Week twenty-five: You shave your hair off.
Week twenty-eight: It’s your niece’s first Communion. When your sister sees you she raises her eyebrows. “New look?” In addition to the buzzcut, you’ve also acquired two piercings. She doesn’t look happy about it, and you feel even worse sitting in church than you used to, like every eye is on you. She doesn’t know you don’t go to Mass anymore, so you follow her up to receive the Eucharist, but at the last minute, you cross your arms over your chest and the priest blesses you instead of giving you the bread. You just hope your sister didn’t notice. Afterwards, there’s a reception and all the second-graders in their white dresses and suits run around the parish hall. You text the girl you’ve now gone on several dates with and tell her where you are. Her response is immediate and sympathetic and she offers to buy you a drink tonight. You agree and that evening you meet her at a dive bar she loves and she buys you a vodka cranberry and a gin and tonic for herself. You sit and talk and laugh, because she’s so good at making you laugh and she thinks you’re funny, too, and have you ever felt this relaxed with another person before? She makes you forget about the things that make it hard to live, but not by erasing anything. By seeing you in another context. You tell her that you wanted to cry for your niece as she received the Eucharist for the first time, an indoctrination into something you’re pretty sure is evil. But you also tell her that you still miss it, the ritual and the beauty. After you’ve each had two drinks, you take her to that all-night taco place your coworker recommended and the red grease from the chorizo drips down your chin and she wipes it off with her thumb. And you are twenty-four and you haven’t believed in god for at least twenty-two weeks and possibly for three and a half years, so you ask her to come back to your apartment where you live alone and where you’ve never had company. She smiles when she walks in and asks why you invited her back. You don’t know how to say it, she’s the one who’s good with words, not you, so you kiss her softly, hesitant, and she seems to understand. Under her hands you become consecrated, form the same but substance absolutely new. Each piece of clothing that comes off sends you farther from Calvary, and her fingers trace your neck, arms, thighs. When she touches you, you think about hands in wounds and life-giving water and proof, evidence, certainty. Then you don’t think of anything at all but her, and her tongue, and the way her neck looks like this, and the way her back feels beneath your heel.
Week twenty-nine: You tell your sister you don’t think you’re Catholic anymore. You say it just to hurt her, not because you care if she knows. She says, “Is it because you’re gay?” You don’t respond. “I’ll pray for you,” she says, and now you feel dirty. Like her prayer is a stain you can’t remove. You think about Christ on the Cross, and you feel something akin to envy. That night, you ask your girlfriend how she knew she was a girl, and she says, “I felt it in my skin. But mostly in how people looked at me. It’s relational, because everything is, right? Nothing in a vacuum.”
Week thirty-three: You buy a suit jacket at the thrift store, sky blue and pure silk, and you walk around the city by yourself wearing it. Nothing is materially different about you, but you think about the last time you tasted the Eucharist, the paper thin wafer and the astringent wine, and you finally know that yes, that was the last time.
C.M. Green (he/they) is a Boston-based writer. They focus on history, memory, religion, and gender in their writing. C.M.’s writing has been published in Full House Literary, beestung, and elsewhere, and they are a 2025 Pushcart nominee. Their debut hybrid chapbook, I Am Never Leaving Williamsburg, is available from fifth wheel press. They support a free Palestine and encourage you to find tangible ways to do the same. You can find their work at cmgreenwrites.com.
