Jordan kept lingering near Ana and me, hoping we had some kind of adventure in mind — which, of course, we did, but unfortunately it didn’t include him. Somehow she and I managed to peel away from the group and did our best to get lost in the monastery’s dimly lit corridors, which were most definitely not open to the public.

“That’s the good thing about Bulgaria,” she said. “They’re not really used to tourists so they don’t think to block anything off.”

As we explored I found it almost comical how our body language transformed. We began walking a little slower, reverently, with our hands clasped behind our backs as if we were trying our best not to be caught out as the heathen interlopers we were.

There were little grottos in the walls where, above lit candles, hung icons of various saints painted in Eastern Orthodox style and crested with halos of gold foil. I thought about the wars of the iconoclasts that raged through this region centuries ago. Men torturing and killing one another, desecrating churches, toppling empires over the questions: What is an image? What power do images hold? Can an image supplant God? Ana said she could never imagine being an icon painter; she wanted credit too badly. I asked if she thought satisfying our egos was the main reason we enjoyed acting. She took this as some kind of personal slight and offered up a scrunched smiley-face in response. But I was asking out of genuine curiosity. The idea of sublimating my creative energies into the anonymous ether of the spiritual seemed like a kind of death to me too. A wasted life. But perhaps that was because we couldn’t disentangle our selves from the enshrined sanctity of “self-expression” we’d been raised to cherish.

As we walked on, our feet echoing over the stone, I told Ana how as a boy I was fascinated by monks. Around the age of eight or nine, I even started having a recurring dream about them. In the dream I found myself wearing these colourful robes and walking through a castle-like building surrounded by other men, gardening, praying, cooking. My body felt radiant with light. It occurred to me just then that maybe the dream was some kind of manifestation of my lifelong repressed fear of death.

“Either that or your lifelong fag-tacularness,” Ana replied. “Which is not so repressed.”

We found ourselves in a small courtyard with a single orange tree. The sky was a deep-blue square so unblemished by clouds that for a second it appeared to be a painted ceiling. Ana walked over to the orange tree and plucked one off.

“I actually think monks are probably more afraid of death than anyone,” she said as she began to peel it. “Monks of any religion.” She thought about this for a moment and slipped an orange slice in her mouth. “Like, on some level, don’t you think a retreat from the world into prayer is… I mean, it has to be motivated by a fear of death. A desire to reconcile themselves with the horror of it. So they spend their whole lives preparing. Quieting the mind. Learning to subdue the self. Becoming nothing.”