My commute to work is automated. I leave the house between 9:15 and 9:20. I walk twenty minutes to the tube, am ferried underground from Bermondsey to Green Park, and walk five minutes to the art gallery where I work. Through trial and error, I have learned which crosswalk lights are fastest and which side of the street is free of the stench of trash. I know which end of the tube has the least people and the most seats. Podcasts soften the mental load of arranging my life along clocks, instead of the sun. Music helps me lose the time I must take to go to the place which helps me afford the music in the first place. I’ve made my peace with the fact that I must do it and that each commute is an echo of the last.
The other day, however, I stumbled upon a bone.
Bloodied on the ball of the joint, the bone lay near the specialty supermarket, in which a deaf cat roams. The bone was about the length of my forearm, but I do not know whether it was the forearm of a human. It could have been the femur of some animal. It was definitely from a limb. I don’t know much about anatomy, but I know a spine or a skull when I see one.
As I stepped over the bone, I thought to myself that it must be an omen.
In my inner life, I often ask for omens to be tossed into my path. I don’t know a lot—about what I should do, where I should focus my attention, who I should let occupy my brain, when I should reach life’s goalposts. But someone up there, in the ether, does know. Why fumble about when I could ask for a flurry of butterflies, see a flurry of butterflies a few days later, and then feel a stirring in my gut, where my intuition dwells, and know what I’m meant to do? This request and receipt of omens has been a hobby of mine for the past few years. Sometimes though, my intuition is confused. Or the omen never materializes. This is par for the course in the flirtation between me and whatever is looking down on me. I trust the process, knowing that I am still learning the language of intuition and divine trust.
Yet when I came upon the bone, not only did I come upon something that shocked me out of the rote chugging of my commute, but I came upon the first instance of an omen I did not ask for.
Why, then, was a bone chucked into my path?
A bone is an inflexible organ, yet it is not actually solid. A bone is compact and then it is spongy. When you were a baby, your bones were composed of haphazard weavings, and now, as an adult, they are composed of parallel sheets of collagen. Right now, your bones are remodeling themselves, yet never changing their shape. Blood cells are blooming out of your marrow at this very moment.
Bones provide structure, but sometimes they are knocked out of place. Recently, a colleague of mine slipped a disc during an aerial fitness class. The cushion of tissue between the bones in her spine slid away, and now her bones are grinding against each other. She and I work for a manager who is, at her best, meticulous and efficient, and at her worst, cruel. I recently put in my notice, which my manager met with derision and contempt and repetition of the phrase, I am disappointed in you. When I told my colleague I was leaving, she asked if she should leave too. Whatever abuse I withstood from my manager is peanuts compared to what my colleague, as her assistant, has to go through, and so I told her she should go, without saying it outright. A week after I put in my notice, the bones in her spine shifted, and she disappeared from the office as she worked from home. My manager stopped looking me in the eye.
When a body decomposes, bones are the last remaining bits. I saw a bear bone once during an interview for the Museum of London. I was interviewing to work in their archaeological archives, and a member of staff took me on a tour through the storage. She showed me a bear’s bone from Elizabethan England that had been excavated from the site of the Globe Theatre. A bear in the theatre? I had said. Bear-baiting, she nodded solemnly, and then pointed out the notches in the bone made by a dog’s teeth. She explained to me that for entertainment, bears were tied to a post and a pack of dogs was unleashed. The animals warred, until either the bear had slashed all of the dogs, or until the dogs bit the bear into submission. That juicy morsel of history had made me really want to work there, just so that I could learn something like that every day, but they rejected me. Bruised, I felt like it was a waste of time to show me the bone if they weren’t going to hire me.
In teasing out the meaning of this omen, I have to investigate all of the other moments in my life in which bones have been central. The bone on the street may want me to pay attention to the fact that my colleague’s bones are out of place, perhaps because she fields so much flack from our manager, and aren’t I so lucky that I have another job lined up so that I don’t have to do that anymore? Or maybe the street bone is beckoning to the bear bone in the dark archives, and to the fact that in London, brutality lurks under my feet at all times.
All of this is complicated by the fact that fifteen minutes after seeing the bone, I saw a nun.
She was on the tube. She was looking at her phone like everyone else. She was doing nothing spectacular outside of being a nun.
Her presence struck me because the day before, I had nothing to do at work, so I googled whether there were any opportunities to volunteer at convent-run initiatives. I was interested in volunteering with a convent, as opposed to a soup kitchen or animal shelter, because I have been lacking Catholic friendship. The hand of spiritual isolation has been clenched around my throat for a while now, but lately it has tightened its grip. I don’t want to suffocate, so I thought that if I volunteered alongside nuns at a convent, I would encounter built-in female friendship centered around faith.
While on the internet, I found the Carmelites of Notting Hill. I imagined nuns parading through Portobello Road Market, holding up antiques to show each other and watching movies in the big chairs at Electric Cinema. In the “About Us” section of their website, I found a prayer request form. So, instead of doing my job, I submitted a prayer request (which I won’t disclose; that’s between me and the Carmelites).
A nun is a woman who devotes her life to religious service, but what is a nun to me? I have great respect for nuns. They are much stronger than I ever will be. I don’t know if it’s possible for me to detach from the world the way they have. I don’t know if I could welcome poverty; I feel naked without my pricey curl cream and I like to collect CDs and I feel comforted lounging in my messy room with all of the trappings of my lived life scattered around me. The absence of obedience is the seeking of worldly honor, and if I’m not seeking some degree of worldly honor, however small, I get bored. Chastity is out. Shedding these worldly accouterments is difficult, and I’m not secure enough to do it.
What is a bone in relation to a nun? The one thing they have in common is that I almost never see them. Bones are the scaffolding of life; a nun scaffolds her days around eternal life. Every nun has bones. Not every bone belongs to a nun. Both give off a whiff of primality, if you consider faith and a desire to touch the unknown a primal hunger.
I don’t know. It’s mentally exhausting to decipher what a bone is, what a nun is, and what they have to do with me.
Maybe neither is an omen. After all, I wasn’t seeking an omen at the time.
Or maybe the bone is the omen, and the nun is not. Or vice versa.
No matter what the truth is, I’m confused. Shouldn’t an omen be clear? I should feel it in my gut. With regards to the bone and the nun, I just don’t know for sure.
The only thing I know for sure is that tomorrow, I need to leave the house between 9:15 and 9:20. I need to walk twenty minutes to the tube, be ferried underground from Bermondsey to Green Park, and walk five minutes to the art gallery where I work. The path I need to take is clear and regimented because I can’t afford to veer off of it.