Lourdes in 1999 was a font of energy as well as soul cleansing water.  Drawn by the reverence and the name; past the string of shops with souvenir bottles and chains, the space opened up to a great plaza in front of the Immaculate Conception Basilica. The entire place was enveloped in a pink and gold haze.  Having wandered through the grotto and interiors I stood with my arms wide looking up to the spire, closed my eyes and begged for the pain to be taken away; to not have to face the unyielding abyss anymore.

Pleading for mercy (but silently in my mind) was a frequent leisure activity then at a time when paying even 10 cents more for a candle might mean not having enough left to pay for food or a bus ticket.  I still have a ledger from those years when I couldn’t afford to make phone calls and had even less if I needed antibiotics or other medicines.  But the poverty wasn’t the reason for the abyss that had accompanied me my entire life. I remember clearly as a toddler sitting in the backseat of the car on the way home from church, looking through the window and thinking “well, I’ll just have to kill myself then because none of this will ever be worth it.” My entire life I’d been fed up with living on terms that weren’t mine; but mostly just despairing at the futility of a life so conditioned and restricted.

Lourdes erased that.  For nearly 10 years I fought and strove and moved from place to place, job to job, gaining weight from a cheap poor diet and inordinate hours mentally chained to desks doing unrewarding work for haughty, ignorant, manipulative people. But during those 10 years I focused on the promises made to me by the manipulators: if you do this I’ll do that.  I held up my end of the bargain over and over to be cheated every single time.  Not by the same person twice mind; rather by similar archetypes of the self-interested who use others thoughtlessly. The cycle got faster and faster as I saw ever more quickly the end result of each new job; and I ended up returning again to the thoughts of a toddler.  After having worked very extremely hard to pretend the conditions of this world aren’t what they are; tried variations on culture and country, the end results were always equally squalid. 

One night dry sobbing on the floor of my bathroom and overcome with a corporal desolation that seemed to intensify with every breath, I heard the downstairs neighbour complain “it just keeps getting worse.”  I looked back on photos in my albums and thought about what I had experienced in ten years, and realised I had not returned to Lourdes and my broken brain considered perhaps the return of darkness was a punishment for that.

I did return to Lourdes then.  In a daze I walked the curved stone pathway up to the sanctuary and turned left to light candles.  As I stood there on the left side of a very large bank of lit votives and before being able to formulate thoughts, tears that I had been unable to cry for a decade streamed down my face. I started beseeching help again; but suddenly was pushed on the shoulder.  Thinking it was surely a mistake I ignored it and tried to return to my imploration, but then my arm was grabbed while a loud Asian in shorts shook me asking “why do people light candles here?” Then seeing my face stopped and murmured to her friend “there’s something wrong with her let’s ask someone else”.  Literally shaken I strained to regain composure but could not.  The lights were too bright and the noise of the masses too loud. I walked about and came back but could do no more than appreciate that the respite from feeling void was over.