Unforgiven: An excerpt

You know how us Catholic girls can be:
We make up for so much time a little too late.
- Alanis Morissette

I did go back when I was 22, just one time. I told my mother because I thought it would make her happy. She cried. Truth be told, I went more out of curiosity than conversion, but didn’t have the heart to tell her. I was lost in an adult world—almost two thousand miles from the roots I’d been so grateful to escape—and went rummaging through the past looking for something I still haven’t entirely been able to identify.

I wanted to see how it would feel, if I'd feel anything at all. I wanted to see if I'd remember the prayers and the hymns, if I was still closed and cynical.

If Catholicism in a beach town in Florida was any different from a small island in the Caribbean.

I stood alone in the opulent cathedral, the only brown face, stumbling over some words, but remembering most. I was rather impressed with my memory, actually. Strangely enough, I also felt safe. It was an old life that I now had the luxury of remembering almost fondly; a good place to visit, but never to stay. The priest’s accent was different, a nasal Midwestern twang, but his intonation was the same, Trinidadian lilt or no. Nothing in this world had changed.

I never went back.