TAKE ME TO CHURCH, The Nun

01. No One's Here To Sleep.

❝...Every carpet, every floor
Everywhere I look, I fall
Climbing up the walls
I'm climbing up the walls
What goes on behind these doors
I'll keep mine and you'll keep yours
We all have our secrets
We all have our secrets

...Behind every door
Is a fall, a fall and
No one's here to sleep

...You were always faster than me
I'll never catch up with you, with you
Oh I can feel them coming for me
And you were always faster than me
I'll never catch up with you, with you
Oh I can feel them coming for me...❞
-No One's Here To Sleep by Naughty Boy

—

   Chapter One;
No One's Here To Sleep.

    Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? Simons used to think it didn't. Now he thinks it does. And he thinks that his is this: a morbid inability to have a mind of his own.

    A moi. L'histoire d'une de mes folies.

Simons O'Donnell was born on a cold January night in 1927 in an Irish village named Avare and he had never seen any other part of the world until he was eighteen. His father owned a small local business and his mother stayed at home to raise him. No sisters, no brothers— which was rare at the time— there had been an unfair responsibility that came to him with being an only child, he grew up knowing he wasn't allowed to disappoint, he wasn't even allowed to die. Cause there wasn't any remplacement toddling around; he was it. At first, it made him desperate to be flawless, and it also made him drunk with the knowledge of that power. In such ways despots did.

When Simons thought of his childhood he found himself unable to recall much about it at all except a sad jumble of objects: the shoes he wore for several years in a row; coloring books and comics from the supermarket; little of interest, less of beauty. Simons was quiet, tall for his age, prone to freckles. He didn't have many friends but whether this was due to choice or circumstance he did not now know. He did well in school, it seems, but not exceptionally well; he liked to read, which he did plenty of times, lying on the carpet of his empty living room in the long dull afternoons after school.

He honestly couldn't remember much else about those years except a certain mood that permeated most of them, a melancholy feeling that he associated with watching 'The Wonderful World of Disney' on Sunday nights. Sunday was a sad day– early to bed, school the next morning, he was constantly worried his homework was wrong– but as he watched the fireworks go off in the night sky, over the floodlit castles of Disneyland, Simons was consumed by a more general sense of dread, of imprisonment within the dreary round of school and home: circumstances which, to him at least, presented sound empirical argument for gloom. His father was mean, and their house ugly, and his mother didn't pay much attention to him; his clothes were cheap and his haircut too short and no one at school seemed to like him that much; and since all this had been true for as long as he could remember, he felt things would doubtless continue in this depressing vein as far as he could foresee.

In short: Simons felt his existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way. Maybe that's how he ended up turning to God. Maybe he thought it would save him. It didn't.

Simons supposed it was not odd, then, that he had trouble reconciling his life to those of his friends, or at least to their lives as he perceived them to be.

The first person he had got to know first after arriving at St. Carta was Cassius, he was an orphan since the age of seven and grew up in a Monastery in London— how Simons longed to be an orphan when he was a child. And James; his mother, when she had him, was only seventeen – a thinblooded, capricious girl with red hair and a rich daddy, who ran off with another woman. Back when he was alive, James was fond of saying that his grandparents brought him and mother up like brother and sister— him and his mother— brought them up in such a magnanimous style that even the gossips were impressed. English nannies and private schools, summers in Switzerland, winters in France— all that until James suddenly gave it all up and cut off his family to turn to God. When Simons heard this story for the fist time, he fought the urge to ask James what the hell he had been thinking.