Free The Dark Path by David Schickler Page B

while her sister sleeps in the next room.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    BUT INSIDE I’M confused, not at peace. When I’m alone in church now, my mind and heart wander toward Mara. Yet when I’m with her, I miss God and the dark, weightless time I spend alone with Him at Mass. Mara and I will be making love in her bed when the thought will land in me,
whump
, that what I’m up to with this girl has God mixed up in it whether I want that or not. Mara is on the pill, but fucking her still has a forever promise built into it, a promise that scares me.
    I talk about all this with no one. Instead I try to love God and Mara in fierce parallel, to keep them distinct from each other by doing extremely religious things for God and extremely romantic ones for Mara. I get obsessive on both fronts.
    Some Catholic friends tell me of the Croatian town of Medjugorje, a mountain village where, beginning in the early 1980s, the Virgin Mary allegedly started appearing to six young people and telling them how humanity could return to God. I don’t know if I buy the story, but the visionaries say that Mary is urging mankind toward fasting and this intrigues me. Like darkness and silence, fasting sounds like a honing, an existential stripping away, an emptying out of myself . . . so maybe it is part of the path.
    I try it. For twenty-four hours each Wednesday and Friday I ingest only water and bread crusts.
    But the fasting only makes me starved for pleasure. Each Wednesday and Friday night I sit on Mara’s couch, watching the clock till midnight. Then I wolf down Lipton butter noodles, haul Mara into her bedroom, and have at her.
    Soon any small thing Mara likes becomes a mission for me to acquire. She likes a Steiff stuffed-animal bird in a shop window: I sneak back alone later that day to buy it. She mentions an obscure Genesis song called “Your Own Special Way”: I scour grimy record stores, buy the album, and make Mara a mix tape.
    On her birthday morning in April, I cook her homemade blueberry muffins, using my mother’s recipe, and I appear in Mara’s bedroom with a tray bearing the Steiff bird and the muffins.
    â€œSurprise!”
    Mara opens her eyes sleepily. “What? Hi, honey . . .”
    â€œHappy birthday! Listen to
this
!” I pop the tape into the stereo and press play. A song begins. “It’s ‘Your Own Special Way’! And we’re going on a picnic!”
    She yawns. “Can’t we just stay in bed?”
    â€œNo!”
    I’ve borrowed Adam Goldman’s car, and I drive us to Rock Creek Park in D.C. In the trunk is a picnic basket that I filled with sandwiches and a bottle of wine shaped like a fish that I bought because Mara once pointed to a bottle of wine shaped like a fish in a store window and said: “Kinda cool.”
    On the picnic we enjoy ourselves. But even the perfect setting and the hip wine bottle can’t make things between me and Mara as perfect as I have been willing, or cosmically demanding, them to be.
    A few weeks later, one night when we’re in bed, I can’t hold inside anymore what’s been bothering me.
    â€œMara.”
    She hears the fear in my voice. “Honey, what is it?”
    â€œI’m too ashamed to say it.”
    She locks her arms around me. “There’s nothing you can’t tell me.”
    â€œI have to stop. I can’t go all the way with you in bed anymore.”
    She strokes my cheeks. Her expression is puzzled but accepting. “Okay.”
    â€œI—I hate that this is the case, but somehow—somehow me giving all of myself to you in full-on sex is something I can’t handle, not till we’re married. I’m sorry.”
    I say that I know that she might blame the Church and I tell her that I want to be like our friends, who seem to have no struggles with sex, but I say that I do have struggles with it, that it touches on God