…and so maybe in the grand scheme of things you could be anywhere, gray skies floating below you and the powerful engine roaring in your ears, or laying on damp green grass that licks your cheeks in the green empty field and wouldn’t you know until you get there…?
Anyway when I was five my parents stuck me in an all-girls Catholic school and I had to wear crisp uniforms that were uncomfortable like hell and wear my hair below my chin and it was lonely and up in the hills far away from civilisation and I only got rid of this torment when I was sixteen.
I think back on that and eleven years is a long time to be dressed in uniforms and eating in assigned lunch tables with girls who think too damn highly of Saint Therese and I’ve got nothing to complain about Saint Therese but I’d like more books about people who have terrible afflictions and town lotteries where people are stoned to death in order to keep their traditions intact and stories of little boys who stick their fingers into a hole in a dam to save the whole town from flooding.
It’s ironic that Catholic education made me doubt the years of spoonfed faith and turn an eye towards the stealthily-masked hyprocrisy of organized religion. But I’m not completely ungrateful. If there’s one thing I thank God for it’s for geometry and science and passion, because geometry told me all about parallel lines, science taught me all about infinity and passion tells me that I never want to be caught up in the hellish idea of parallelism, that stretches to infinity without any hope of meeting nor changing.
Because well, however much people say you can’t go beyond the lines drawn, why should you sit there following a line into forever when you could be anywhere you choose.
