We headed back the way we came, passing a steepled church between two campus buildings. Tristan slid me a conspiratorial glance. He gripped the curved black handle, the door opening with a tug. I was relieved to be inside; my cheeks stung, my lashes wet and spotted with snow. As much as I hated attending service as a kid, I had a soft spot for sacred spaces, for the breathtaking beauty of stained glass, the bright, guttural sound of church bells. After getting sober, for months my dad went to church every Sunday. He’d drag me with him at my mom’s behest (though she never went herself), and I’d fall asleep with my head in his lap. He never woke me. I came to understand it wasn’t religious fervor that brought him there but a need for a place to put himself.
Tristan and I climbed into the pews, whispering so our voices wouldn’t carry. The lingering taste of coffee, the surprise of snowfall, the trespassing, all gave the night an exaggerated romantic edge. I knew I’dtry to write about it later but would fail to capture the warm-blue aura of how it all felt.
Tristan was distracted when we sat, looking at his phone. I asked him if something was wrong.
“Sorry, I’m just looking at this email.” He let out a long, agitated sigh. “My church was supposed to host several Afghan refugees this week, but the administration paused the program. Now we have to scramble to put them in a hotel and we don’t have the money. And that’s the ones whose flights weren’t canceled. These are American allies, by the way.” His voice grew fervent. “They’ll be killed if they can’t get out. It’s just, it’s fucked-up.”
I shook my head, mouth tight. “Can you imagine being an interpreter helping Americans during the war only to watch your flight be canceled?”
“No one has to imagine it, it’s happening. It’s happened here, to Americans.”
“But people can’t imagine stuff until it happens to them. Oh my God, did you hear about the woman in South Africa who has a silicone device stuck in her vagina now because they shut down USAID? There aren’t any doctors to take it out because they’ve been put on leave.”
Tristan laughed humorlessly, dropping his head into his lap. Sitting back up, “Let’s talk about something else.”
I was relieved. I didn’t want to be the one to say, let’s stay under this spell we cast over the night, let’s drown ourselves in this warm-blue feeling. “What made you want to study philosophy?”
He paused. “No one thinks it’s relevant anymore, but I think it’s more important than ever. It’s not questioning everything to be annoying, it defamiliarizes the familiar so you can actually see it clearly. Like, so much shit in politics, life, whatever, is inertia, not reason. But there’s no room for inertia in philosophy. Questions by nature are a movement toward something else.”
He lifted his arm on the pew, his hand now an inch away from my chin. Even this innocuous shift made me woefully alert to his body. Amemory seemed to return to him. He smiled. “I was stupid obsessed with Camus in high school. Mostly because he was cool, French, had a bunch of women. But he also wasn’t just in a room talking. He was basically poor growing up, and was the editor in chief of a resistance newspaper during the war. Remember how his stuff was all over the internet during the pandemic because ofThe Plague? But the actual plague he was talking about was fascism.” He coughed into his elbow. “Anyway, back to high school, sorry, I’m fucking tired, but absurdity, this idea that nothing happens for a reason was…” He paused. “?‘Comforting’ isn’t the right word, but it felt freeing to me. I mean the myth of Sisyphus could easily be about clinical depression.” He laughed. “Just that, even though there’s senseless cruelty in the world and our lives may mean nothing, we still protect life, we seek meaning anyway.”
Before I could respond, he asked, “Why writing?”
“I feel like we’ve talked about this already.”
“I feel like you’re avoiding my question.”
I paused. “I used to write about my dreams when I was little and turn them into these books I stapled together in a manila folder. I didn’t know the difference between a dream and a story. But I don’t know. I think my answer isn’t all that different from yours.”
“How so?”
“A story is like a map to me. I’m trying to reach some new place with it. But while you write, the world is moving, it’s changing, and it’s, like, who cares, everyone has Waze anyway.”
“That how you feel right now?”
I paused. “You know, I was talking to my friend, an acquaintance, really, about Gaza a few months ago, a Black girl. She was like, Why do you care so much about the Palestinians? My first reaction was to be incensed. But she was like, Why aren’t we talking about Sudan? Why don’t you care about Haiti? And I was like, I do care. But then I saw that the story of white people stealing land, weaponizing apartheid, genocide, that’s a story that activates me, that I can find myself in. But thestory of Black people massacring other Black people, that’s a story I don’t know what to do with.”
He watched me. “What happens when the story no longer serves the people in it?”
“I don’t know.”
His fingers found my cheek. They were freezing. I brushed his hand over my lips. Meeting his eyes, I slipped his thumb into my mouth. He made a small, pitiful sound. My stream of thoughts snagged on Jay like a branch, but the current of salt and skin was stronger. There had to be a way to have both him and nights like this.
Tristan shoved his thumb deeper. “It’s like you’re taking Communion.”
With a full mouth, I said, “I’m agnostic.”
He laughed. I thought he was going to kiss me, but he gently removed his thumb.
“I don’t wanna fuck up this relationship,” he groaned.
“With me?”
He blinked. “With Nia. It’s…” He ran a hand over his face, falling silent.
“Want to pray about it?” I sounded like my grandma when she was alive.
He laughed. I laughed too. “I don’t know why I’m laughing,” he said. “I actually do pray. But the way you said it made it sound dumb.”
