Mary
I have always been . . . different . . . though I did not always know it. No, that isn’t quite true. I’ve always known. Even as a child one knows these things instinctively. What I should have said was I didn’t always understand it.
One of the fey, my Welsh grandmother used to say with a keen, dark eye. Fey. Such a charming little word, bright and otherworldly. For years I thought it meant fairy-born. Then one day I came across it in a story and realized it meant something quite different. It meant touched, crazy—cursed. Even then, my grandmother knew that there was something not quite right about me. And looking back, I believe I must have frightened my parents. They never left off watching me. Something to do, I suppose, with my mother’s sister, who was always given to bouts of depression and threw herself from a window when she was sixteen.
I wasn’t supposed to know about that, but I did. An accident, they called it, rather than what it was—a blot on the family name, an unredeemable sin against God. Perhaps it’s why they sent me to the nuns. They had no faith in doctors. But they did have faith in the Almighty. And Lord help me, those little gray birds did their level best to mold me into a blank, colorless replica of their kind, to empty me of me, to make me over for God. They brought their prayers and their beads and their candles to bear, but in the end I would have none of it.
Would now that they had succeeded.
Taking the veil would have stood in the way of so many sorrows. Not for me. I would ask no reprieve, nor do I deserve one. My sorrows are of my own making, my yoke to bear for what remains of this life, and, I suppose, the one beyond. But for those whose lives were mine to cherish, lives that were lost instead, I heartily wish I had chosen differently. Instead, when happiness beckoned, shiny and false, I closed my eyes to the truth and ran toward disaster with arms wide open. So much lost in the name of love. So much in ruins.
Through my fault.
Through my fault.
Through my most grievous fault.