JULIA ST. JOHN
University of Pittsburgh

Love Notes to the Impossible

I.
Lauren has little bioluminescent algae in her room,
tiny dinoflagellates that pulse with light when disturbed.
She showed them to me in the 1 a.m. darkness, and I stood there
in their glow, my thoughts somewhere else, but my eyes fixed on them—
glowing secret in my roommate’s room.
 
II.
I wore an oversized sweater and we talked about martyrdom. 
Jack’s hands on his steering wheel and the fog heavy around the car
like an envelope. Like the clouds had gotten tired and decided
to make a bed of the mountain roads we were driving through. 
 
Mary Liz left for the convent today; I won’t see her for a month. 
No one will see her for a month (at least). Hidden away in Vermont, in the cloister,
in the woods, in the snow. Latin chants at sunrise. I didn’t even say goodbye,
not really; studying biochem all day and then driving back from Steubenville 
 
last night and my phone was almost dead and I was lost and Nora had to come rescue me.
By the time I got home, Mary Liz was asleep,
and now she’s gone, and I’m still here,
amino acids on flashcards haloed out on the table in front of me. 
 
III.
Kait texts me asking if we can cut our hair together
and I say yes because she just went through a break-up and
 
I think that maybe friendship means taking scissors to
the dead parts.
 
IV.
I ran into Conor yesterday, in Langley. We chatted for a while. 
Freshman year, I wrote a poem where I said his eyes
were dark brown eyes/like a stone
dropped into water/like a shadow 
over the Earth. 
 
The thing is, his eyes are green. Clearly green. 
Wide and friendly as we were talking. 
 
What kind of person is too busy writing a poem 
to actually look someone in the eyes? 
 
V.
 In the chapel, praying one day, I sat back from the kneeler
only to receive a soft tap on my left shoulder.
I glanced to the side and saw the young man next to me
holding out a little book. “Do you want this?”
 
“Uh, sure,” I half-whispered back, taking it into my hand gently,
a living thing. He started to speak again,
so I lifted my eyes from the book cover and was met there
by his blue irises, which looked like something precious and broken,
their color unforgivably loud in the church-quiet.
“I see our Blessed Mother in you—” he said, earnest and softly urgent,
“—so clearly. So, I wanted you to have that.”
 
The virgin Mother of God, the Queen of Heaven—
that someone could look at me, bowed over in prayer
in scuffed-up white Doc Martens, a slouchy gray jacket
and cuffed jeans, with short curls, dark circles under my eyes,
and see her—O clement, O loving, O sweet virgin Mary—
the one who crushed the serpent beneath her heel—Mirror of Justice,
Tower of David, Gate of Heaven, Queen of Martyrs—
my cheeks Eucharistically pink.
 
VI.
 Wearing makeup always makes me squirm.
Nicole and I were catching up at the Senior Cocktail Night
last night and she was just glowing, gushing
about how good prayer has been, how excited she was
for the future. 
 
She told me about her relationship with Josh,
how good their month and a half of dating has already been.
“He brings me to Heaven. Not gonna lie—he makes me
more of a saint.” She kept saying “my heart is just so full
of love. I just want to share it, I just want to give.” 
I have been burning too, in a different way. 
I don’t quite know how to talk about purgative love
and the dark night of the senses over cocktails,
when everyone is around like that, and she’s just over-the-moon
in love with God, so I contented myself
with skimming the surface of my own life as we chatted.
 
VII.
At one point in the car, Jack said to me, 
“Christianity has always been radical. 
Do you know what the most radical thing that ever happened is? 
There was a group of people claiming
that God became a man 
 
and died and rose from the dead, 
and they were being killed for it, brutally. 
 
And people saw that, 
saw these people being eaten by lions and crucified,
and said, I want what they have.”
 

VIII.
The drive from Denver to Pittsburgh was taking its toll.
Stopped at a gas station, standing in the lot, some of the guys
stood off to the side and debated whether to self-quarantine.
I was watching the tension in their flannelled shoulders
 
until Alex sidled up next to me, 
knocked his shoulder into mine,
and insisted that we dance
to some invisible music all his own.
 
IX.
“I had this fear that I would dedicate my life to the Oratory 
and then one day it would just implode,” Ren tells Anna and me 
as the three of us sit in a cozy nook of the Treehouse.
 
“But that’s the risk. Someone we”—her eyes flick over to me with this word—
“have very real connections to—got hit by a train and is now a quadriplegic. 
His brain didn’t go unchanged, either. And his wife didn’t sign up for that, 
you know, she had no way of knowing that would happen when she married him, 
but it did. And now that’s her life. There’s always that risk, in whatever we do.”
 
I know who she’s talking about, immediately, because it’s Anthony’s brother-in-law. 
I also know that the whole family celebrates “Train Day” every year, 
the anniversary of the accident, by having a party with a cake and everything. 
 
X.
I am trying to make sense of them:
these million little impossibilities,
and where I stand among them.
 
One day, Nora tells me you were built to live in a golden age,
compares me to a Victorian child the next.
Goldenrod and fainting couches. This delicate creature.
 
Lord, I don’t want to claim to know anything about grief,
about loss. The uncontrollable chaos that enters a human life.
Am I playing dress-up? I could draw the stigmata on my palms in red marker,
make-believe that I know what it all means.
 
But no, here I am, using my last stamps, sending these letters out 
with no return address. It doesn’t worry me.
Nothing has stopped You 
from finding Your way to me before.

Julia St. John is a poet, scientist, friend, and recent graduate from the University of Pittsburgh with a B.S. in neuroscience. This is her first publication. You can find her at @stjohnthesilent on Instagram.