The Center sent us home a week early. There was no ceremony. The board sprang for the changed plane tickets. The staff hired vans to get rid of us quicker. The monks watched us go without a word. Coming down from the mountain in a clean white van full of crying teenage girls, I nearly choked on all the extra air rushing into my lungs. I knew I was supposed to feel stronger, more powerful with all that new, thick air inside of me. I knew I was supposed to feel as if I could run forever without stopping. But instead I felt weighed down, pinned to my seat, some old wound in the vinyl scratching at my thigh. Laurel was at the front of the van. Through the spaces in the rows, I could see her head against the window, smacking it hard with every bump. In the seat directly behind her, Harriet was making out extravagantly with a Tiger who I thought was called Penelope. Janet wasn’t even in our van. She had gone on ahead. In the end we hadn’t even said goodbye. We drove past an old church, moss and bricks. A flashing blue cross was stuffed into its crumbling roof, neon tubes bent into a symbol of salvation instead of EAT or OPEN or XXX. And why not? All are, finally, offering the same thing. There was a squadron of tall nuns circling in the courtyard, but when I looked again, their figures resolved into demure blue umbrellas, folded against the wind. The van swerved and squealed, but I felt nothing in my stomach. The summer had cured me of one affliction, at least.

Saint Teresa, on the moment after: “Here comes the pain of returning to this life; here it is the wings of the soul grew, to enable it to fly so high: the weak feathers are fallen off.”

Poor Saint Teresa. On the day she died—young, only sixty-seven—the proximate cause likely being uterine cancer, she collapsed after communion and proceeded to hemorrhage from the vagina for fourteen hours. The gathered witnesses declared she died in ecstasy; her doctors interpreted her vaginal bleeding as evidence of the inevitable consummation of her long relationship with God. They were overjoyed, the lot of them, to see that God was taking her virginity at last: look at all this blood to prove it, the moment of the truly unbearable; put a veil on her, a new bride, her blush seeping away. This was everything she wanted, they told one another. Praise the Lord.