My best friend wasn’t raised Catholic, but her boyfriend was. He tells her the stories he learned in church every Sunday and she imagines them the same way I imagine falling in love after I spend the night asking my Tarot cards about a woman who won’t text me back tomorrow. She walks away with vague ideas of sacraments and confessionals, decides to believe in patron saints the way she believes in astrology.
She chooses a saint for herself, reads through stories on Britannica and sifts through them, each one more horrifying than the last, settles on Laura Vicuña because she was just a normal girl, because “she just really loved the church, and they decided that was enough”.
That night, I Google the saint I chose for the first time in 20 years, searching for meaning I can claw out like a tumor. St. Lucy, Patron Saint of the Blind, plucked her own eyes out to make herself less desirable to a man who wanted her, a metaphor so obvious I’m not sure it’s worth writing, and I wonder who my patron saint would be if I could choose over again, could shed the one I’d chosen at 12-years-old while my mother spent evenings weaving guilt into my veins.
Is there a patron saint of women trying to figure out who they are without their mother there to tell them? Of a woman finding desire for the first time in her 30s, wondering if it’s too late to learn how to love, checking the weight of an orgasm in the palm of her hands and imagining what God would think of the want she fills between the cracks of every poem she writes. I imagine trailing my fingers across her throat, can almost feel her hands between my thighs, and it’s holier than any God I could have imagined.
I know forgiveness is the virtue I’m meant to strive towards, remember teachers and priests evangelizing it, can line up all the times I’ve been told to forgive and have buried my resentment to make space for it as a timeline the length of my spine. But is there a patron saint of people who aren’t inclined towards forgiveness, who can tell me where to put down all the anger I’ve been carrying since birth, since I inherited it from my mother and from her mother before her?
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Kiersten McMonagle is a Philadelphia-based writer. She’s been writing since she learned to hold a pencil, with her recent work focusing on the balance between her queer identity and her upbringing in the Catholic Church. She can be found on Instagram @Kiersten_McMonagle.
Rejection Letters 