Partying With the Nuns
An Easter retreat at the only Catholic shrine in Britain.
MAY 6, 2025
It was a Catholic journalist who told me about the Holy Triduum retreat in Walsingham, North Norfolk. If you really want to get Christianity in Britain, he said, that’s where it’s happening. The retreat takes place from Maundy Thursday (the day before Good Friday) to Easter Sunday. Visitors stay in the Dowry House guesthouse, over the road from the site of the original Catholic Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. In 1538, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the medieval statue of Our Lady of Walsingham (a classic Madonna and child) was plundered then lost to time. The shrine was destroyed, its only remaining feature the stone outline of the great east window of the priory built to house the shrine, which stands like a gaping mouth, a howl against its own decreation.
Our group would be the last ever attendees hosted by the Community of Our Lady of Walsingham. After six years, the sisters were packing up to return to living full-time at their convent in nearby Dereham. This added a certain dignity and some melancholy to proceedings. The sisters had loved being here, at the epicenter of British Catholicism, they told us, but ultimately, it was never in their hands. Their many years of training have taught them this: God has a plan, and who are they to resist its fulfilment?
“Who are you and why are you here?” they asked us during our introductory session the night before Maundy Thursday. There were no men on the final Dowry House Triduum retreat. One woman had lost her husband several years ago. He had been so very good, she told us. She couldn’t understand why he was taken from her. She was here to build her trust in God back up. In her large suitcase, she’d brought an iron and a kettle — just in case, she said, and started to laugh. A nurse had come straight off a night shift and told us with an insomniac accent that she was here to find some peace. There was an American student in a sweater with the slogan “How Great Thou Art” who said she was having a hard time with her friendships. After posting about the overturning of Roe v. Wade on Facebook, she had been spurned by a bunch of friends. Now she understood this was God removing toxic people from her life (her language half-otherworldly, half-TikTok). She said how relieved she was to be here among Catholics who get it, and I thought how very young she looked beside all these older women. She told us, this young woman who believed that abortion was murder, that after university she would be joining the United States Air Force.
I have always lived in a reality where there was once a figure called Jesus Christ who was crucified and then apparently came back to life. For this reason, it had become something which seemed, to my mind, oddly banal.
Then there was a woman I’ll call Elizabeth. She had come on the retreat because her sons had grown up, her husband had left her, her mother, whom she had cared for through years of sickness, had passed away, and now she wanted to work out what her life might be for. I liked Elizabeth a lot. She was good at asking the necessary questions. “So, what’s the story with you lot becoming nuns?” she would probe any chance she got. Each time the American student arrived at lunch to tell us where she had spent the morning in prayer, Elizabeth would nudge me and whisper, “She’s very pious, isn’t she? For a young person.” I explained that I was here as a writer, but, also, to understand the true meaning of Easter. Retreats have this effect on a person, bring out in you the worst platitudes. I also told them that I was not a Catholic, not really a Christian, but that I was confirmed as an Anglican, in response to which I received some confused, vaguely suspicious looks.
“It will forever transform how you experience Holy Week,” the nuns in their light blue robes told us that first night. And this proved true. I can’t tell you when I first learnt about Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection. It feels like something I have always known, like my mother’s maiden name, like the fact of our planet turning around the sun. I have always lived in a reality where there was once a figure called Jesus Christ who was crucified and then apparently came back to life. For this reason, it had become something which seemed, to my mind, oddly banal.
No period has more significance to the Christian faith than Easter. There would be no Christianity if not for Christ’s return on Easter Sunday. Instead he might have been remembered as another god or angel among many, who came down for a while to heal some bodies, heal some souls, who tried in vain to teach us how to get back to the radix of our lives, then left again. In the Bible, Paul’s letter to the Corinthians spells it out: “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.”
In Walsingham we experienced Christ’s Passion as if it were happening in real time. It was like spending four days in an immersive theatrical production, every person who made the pilgrimage to Walsingham an actor in the proceedings. From Good Friday until Saturday night the whole village was held under the penumbra of the eclipse the Gospel writers claimed had arrived as Christ drew his last breath on the Cross.
Leading the retreat were four sisters and three postulants (nuns in an early stage of formation, a period lasting between six months to a year). They had the same luminous skin and attitudes of earnest joy, mostly the same bobbed haircuts (these were unshrouded nuns), physiques simultaneously sturdy and soft — you imagined they were not easily knocked over. But they were also always sporting new injuries, one with a blue plaster wrapped around a ring finger, another crying out as she burned her palm on the flint while lighting a candle in their chapel. They spent a lot of time beckoning each other from doorways to whisper quiet, fretful words. I had the eerie sense that all this concentrated time together was causing them to grow into one another, become a single amorphous sister.
“I’m still nervous of nuns,” one of the women on retreat confessed — several of them had gone to schools run by Catholic sisters. “They could be so cruel.”
An Irish postulant with light grey hair nodded gravely. A lot of things were done very badly back then, she said to us. So much was repressed in those women, and it came out twisted, in anger, in cruelty against those they should have been protecting.
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Walsingham is a site of pilgrimage because it’s the only place in Britain that can claim a Vatican-approved Marian Apparition. According to the story, the Virgin Mary appeared to Rychold de Faverches, a Catholic noblewoman, in 1061. She came down like a holograph alongside Rychold as she walked through the forests outside Walsingham. Then she magicked Rychold to the house in Nazareth where the Angel Gabriel broke through into the human realm to say, “Do not to be afraid, but you will bear a child who will reign over the descendants of Adam for the rest of time” — as if the pressures of childbearing were not enough. Mary commanded the noblewoman to construct in Norfolk a replica of the house so that it would become a site of pilgrimage for the people of this converted country, and she did so. Are only some of us able to admit religious experiences, or is it that the rest of us do not take seriously any more those dreams which ask us to do the most improbable things?
In Walsingham we experienced Christ’s Passion as if it were happening in real time. It was like spending four days in an immersive theatrical production, every person who made the pilgrimage to Walsingham an actor in the proceedings.
There were many, many religious services on the Triduum retreat. Our days were bookended by prayers led by the sisters in a chapel out the back of Dowry House. Every day there was also at least one service at the Basilica, a great barn-like structure a few miles from Dowry House where the Holy Week services were held to accommodate the many pilgrims. The rest of our time was taken up with lectures on various aspects of the Easter story, and one screening of a Catholic-appropriate Hollywood movie. After evening prayers we were expected to remain in silence until morning, sleeping in single beds in private rooms, a crucifix nailed above each of our headboards.
We discovered the sisters were always in a rush, always on the verge of lateness, running in and out of their accommodation, seeking car keys, prayer books, a young postulant who had gone missing at just the wrong moment. That week all we did was shuttle between the new Catholic shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, set into the field-lands outside the village of Little Walsingham, and the retreat center. Usually we walked, but when we were really late, the sisters would drive us in an ancient car. On Good Friday we all gripped the interior handles as a sister in sandals took the accelerator all the way down on a tiny gravel road, loose rocks flying up, skittering against the windows. Over the curdled sound of the engine, the sister in the front passenger seat prayed for our safe travel.
This journey took us along the Pilgrims’ Holy Mile, which begins in Little Walsingham, whose high street is overrun with Marian-themed gift shops all capitalizing on Rychold’s vision. The Mile itself is an old railway track on a sloping hill which leads to the Slipper Chapel, which had replaced the destroyed shrine as the house for the replica Our Lady of Walsingham statue. This was the busiest the Mile got all year. Our first pilgrimage along it, heading to the Maundy Thursday service, we were overtaken by an elderly priest who flew by on an electric wheelchair through the pink haze of the evening, his cassock billowing out behind him. Then a stream of altar boys in jeans and hoodies pelted past on bikes, followed by several Irish Traveller families with rosaries glinting between their shiny nails as they proclaimed Hail Marys at dizzying, almost unintelligible speeds.
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A retired bishop had been brought in especially for Triduum (the Pope decrees all Catholic clergy must retire at 77). When he was barely able to break the consecrated wafer with his shaking hands before the altar in the Basilica, we looked politely away. In the sermon, his voice was reduced to a thin croaking. Then some pre-selected members of the congregation came forward to sit on the lip of the elevated plane by the altar, take their shoes off and have their feet washed by the retired bishop. Afterwards he kissed each wet foot, just as Christ did in John’s Gospel before the Last Supper, to teach his disciples by example how to resist the trappings of power and stay humble. In our lecture beforehand, one of the sisters had asked us why we thought Christ washed their feet and not some other body part.
“Because that’s where we carry the pain we try to hide,” one of the women replied. “Our corns and our bunions. All of our nakedness is in our feet.”
After Holy Communion in the Basilica we processed down the road to the Slipper Chapel.
Among those queuing outside the chapel were people from all over the world. The Irish Travellers with spectacular makeup and false eyelashes, their children in cycling shorts and crop tops, immaculately dressed English families with small armies of neat children, families from Goa, from the Caribbean, from Malaysia, all here to see Our Lady. Some of them would stay in the chapel all night, keeping vigil.
Eventually it was our turn to see Our Lady of Walsingham in her blue gown and red underclothes, holding the lily that symbolized her virginity. On her lap the baby Christ reaches out for her lily with one hand, in the other holding the book of his as yet unlived life. Mary herself is impassive, her look vacant. In Luke, when the angel told her she would bear the Son of God, Mary replied, “Behold I am the servant of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word.” In the Latin Vulgate Bible it is, Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum. This ‘fiat’ — let it be done — is essential to the sisters’ conception of their identity as an order. They are led in all they do by a joyful fiat, they explained to us. Let it be done to me. I will take it.
They spent a lot of time beckoning each other from doorways to whisper quiet, fretful words. I had the eerie sense that all this concentrated time together was causing them to grow into one another, become a single amorphous sister.
Some months later I would stand before another statue of Mary in Durham Cathedral’s Galilee Chapel. The Polish artist Joseph Pyrz’s statue of the Annunciation is life-sized, carved out of dark ash. Mary’s hair is in tight, skull-close curls, her forehead and cheekbones high, dark and light swirls of wood grain patterning her skin. From the neck down this Mary becomes abstracted, because how else might you show a body so transfigured that it can now hold a supernatural being? Her high ribs fan out like sheaves of paper, her torso and belly one smooth undulating plane, a groove running through the center of her like the cut of an axe. This Mary did not say “let it be done to me,” but “I am doing this: My body is the site of the miracle, do not forget it.” Her eyes are shut and behind those closed lids she is having an internal encounter with an angel to which no one else is witness. She had so little in common with the waxy Mary of the Slipper Chapel.
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Venerating Mary meant everything to the Catholic women at Dowry House. They spoke of Our Lady as if she were right there with us. Our Lady was chaste, willingly, willfully passive, untainted by the grottiness of ordinary life. But she could also change the course of things. As a gift on Easter Sunday, Elizabeth gave me a laminated Immaculate Heart of Mary prayer card. She said, “If you pray to this Mary, it will always work. She’s amazing.” This Mary had the same glazed eyes and blank face as the Mary in the Slipper Chapel. The various Mary prayer cards reminded me of the collectible packs of Pokémon cards we would trade as children, kept talisman-like in back pockets. As Pokémon evolve between various forms, so Mary proves mutable. She can be any Mary you want her to be — Our Lady of Walsingham, Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, Mother of Mercy, Mother of Sorrows, Mother of Angels, Queen of the World.
One afternoon, in a break from our packed schedule, I went to read in the cafe at the Anglican Shrine, which housed another copy of the lost Our Lady statue. The book I was reading was Alone of All Her Sex, in which the feminist academic Marina Warner assiduously traces the origins of the Virgin Mary narrative, revealing just how scant the seeds were from which the great forest of Mariology has grown.
I thought it might act as an antidote to all the Marian eulogizing going on around me. Though antidote is not quite right. It implies there was a poison to get out. What I wanted, I suppose, was an explanation for the passive role of Mary, which still holds currency in many denominations of Christianity. I wanted proof that such passivity had never been an essential feature of the Christian mystery, that it was rather a symptom of the patriarchal authority which has governed the religion’s progress.
In the Gospels and Paul’s Letters, there is no evidence of Mary’s Immaculate Conception (the belief that Mary, too, was born under miraculous circumstances, was dreamed up in the second-century apocryphal Gospel of James, the author claiming to be Christ’s brother). In fact, a single Old Testament line might be the source for the virginal aspect of the cult of Mary. In the book of the prophet Isaiah, it is declared, “Behold a virgin shall be with child and bring forth a son, and will call him Emmanuel.” The Gospel writers bolstered their narratives of Christ’s life with a wealth of allusions and references from the Old Testament. And so Mary’s virgin status may have been added in Matthew, and later Luke, not to emphasize her purity, but to strengthen the authority of the Christ figure within the Judeo-Christian schema.
I returned to meet my retreat crew for lunch at what had become our usual table in the dining hall. The other women were talking about their children who no longer attend Mass. I’ve put it with Our Lady, one of them said, her gaze directed to the ceiling. I imagined saying, “Listen, I just read that Mary’s virginity was most likely nothing more than the author of Luke and Matthew attempting to strengthen the authority of the Gospel story.” But that statement would not undermine their faith. How arrogant I was to have thought it might. The women in Walsingham’s understanding of Mary outstrips at every moment her portrayal in scripture. This is the work of faith, believing beyond what can be proved by sense. In every prayer service in Dowry House’s chapel, we would repeat, “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,” the lines spoken by Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, when Mary turns up at her house in the Gospel of Luke, having journeyed by herself, already pregnant, into the hill country of Judea. Here she is afforded the most dialogue she will get in the Bible. With another woman she sings of the God of the Israelites as she knows him, “He has brought down rulers from their thrones/ But has lifted the humble./ He has filled the hungry with good things/ but he has sent the rich away empty.” Perhaps it was from his mother that Christ inherited his radical spirit.
At the same time, it’s hard to get away from the patriarchal contexts tucked into the image of Mary. It is part of a deeply entrenched (still very alive) masculine horror at and distrust of female sexuality and desire. If a woman is to be venerated, she must first be unsexed, her look made blank. The fourth-century priest and theologian St Jerome went as far as to suggest Mary would not have needed a midwife at Christ’s birth because it was an event too miraculous, too perfect for there to exist any complications, blood or gore. Knowing that the nuns’ let it be done to me, which was first Mary’s let it be done to me, emerged from such contexts, I found it harder to take seriously the empowerment behind the sisters’ choice to live as consecrated virgins.
And so I asked one of the younger postulants if I could interview her. Isabella is 30, but her long brown plaits and makeup-less face make her look younger. She was brought up in a Catholic household, attended a Catholic school — though hardly anyone is actually Catholic at Catholic school anymore, she said. Her certain faith left her feeling lonely sometimes, at odds with her peers.
Until her late 20s, Isabella had never even considered a consecrated life. After her theology degree she got a job at an accountancy firm. She had experienced periods of depression and anxiety before, but the pressures of full-time work were making it worse. Prayer became a source of consolation: The more she prayed, the less ruled she felt by fear and the more she felt able to reflect on the kind of person God had made her to be. “I imagined a marriage and a family, just like everyone else. But there comes a point where…” she paused. “I think God created me to love and to give my whole life for the sake of others.” All the postulants framed it this way, as if women still had only two options for the future: marriage to a man or devotion to a God.
Isabella has only been with the Sisters of Our Lady of Walsingham for a short time. As soon as she arrived, though, she recognized what a gift it was to live this way. Here her time would not pass without her noticing. “I don’t want to miss my life,” she said to me. “I want to actually live it.”
“I think that all the time,” I replied. It was why I had reacted negatively to the idea that there were still only two routes ahead for a woman to choose between, as if there weren’t a million kinds of life for us to try out these days. I told Isabella that, to my mind, becoming a sister was choosing to miss your life, all its many possibilities. “Maybe you’ll say, ‘But we gain a spiritual richness,’” I said. “But there’s a lot of world you’re giving up on.”
“In some senses, yes,” Isabella said, selecting her words carefully. “But something I’m finding is that I’m a lot more connected to the wider world here. I think because I have the space to be present. I can keep up with other people’s lives because I’m not so caught up in my own.” (The sisters read the news over breakfast together every morning.) “I’m facing reality more. But in a different way. Like I’m more aware of the reality of life, all its joys and sorrows.” Her desire for a family does not go away. “Every path God invites us on requires sacrifice. To every ‘yes’ we make, there’s a ‘no’ to something else. And I have to grieve and let go of that. If God calls me to the consecrated life, I’ll have to journey with the pain of not having my own children. And then I’ll rejoice at the joy of all the people I will serve.”
Then a priest cried out theatrically, “He is risen!” and everything in the Basilica turned electric. The American student swapped her black lace headscarf for one embroidered with bees and flowers, the other women and I all embracing each other, the shroud over Walsingham lifted for another year.
Her purpose, the path God invites her on, stretches out like a bright track into the future. Sometimes there’s too much mist for her to see the road ahead, but that doesn’t mean it ever goes away. On the Sisters of Our Lady of Walsingham website, they include their schedule back at the convent in Dereham. Rise at 6:15, an hour of eucharistic adoration, morning prayers, Mass, evening prayers, night prayers. If Isabella stays with the sisters she will do this every day, for her whole life.
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Easter Saturday is the most drawn-out day in the Christian calendar, a long wait between the extremes of human experience, impossible grief and indescribable joy. In the afternoon, there was opportunity to take confession at the Basilica. The other women on the retreat rehearsed what I should say.
“As soon as you come in say, ‘I’m not a Catholic.’”
“Maybe say you’re an Anglican, but you’d like to take confession.”
“Maybe just say you’re a Christian.”
I wasn’t really listening. I was thinking about my sins. Like most people, I think, I have a secret catalogue of my wrongs kept somewhere in my head and brought out mostly when I cannot sleep: memorable acts of teenage nastiness, break-ups I could have managed better, cruelties directed towards my mother. I have confessed these before, to therapists, to my friends, and I have found the process cathartic. But this was the first time I had taken my failings to someone divinely appointed to release them from me.
“Hello, Father, I’m not a Catholic, but I think I’ve sinned,” I said very quickly as I entered the confessional.
“Ah.” The retired bishop motioned to a kneeler in front of the low square of glass between my room and his. “Would you like the curtain closed or open?” I went for closed, and a hand drew a purple curtain across.
“So. Are you planning to become a Catholic?”
“Actually, I’m confirmed as an Anglican.”
“I am unable to absolve you of your sins. Because you are not a Catholic. But I can bless you.”
“OK, great. And I just…” The voice said nothing, so I unleashed my litany of minor harms. It felt like this auditing went on for a long time. It was strangely liberating, or perhaps predictably liberating.
Afterwards the voice blessed me. Then said, “I think you are lost.”
I was hearing that a lot these days.
“You’re on a journey. And you’re searching for the way to turn. All I can say to you is, Listen to God. And those around you.”
I wondered about his qualifications for this job, the very old man behind a curtain telling me I am on a journey, part-therapist, part-horoscopist. “And then you will find the true church, the church of Peter, who holds the keys to heaven.”
I made to leave.
“And I will confide something to you.”
The tables had turned.
“I too am a convert. I was once an Anglican.”
I nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see me.
“Take your time on the journey,” he said, louder now. “But don’t take too long.”
As I waited for Elizabeth to finish her confession, I googled the bishop. He had been an Anglican priest. In 1995 he converted to Catholicism, along with a swathe of Anglican priests following the historic milestone of women being ordained for the first time into the priesthood in the Church of England.
“I just find that so disappointing,” I protested to Elizabeth as we walked back along the Holy Mile. She had told me enough about her biography that I assumed she would sympathize with my position. The role of mother had barred her from exploring other identities. She had been married to a man who did not appreciate her. She often felt isolated inside the life she’d accidentally ended up living. After her divorce, she’d realized she didn’t really have any friends. She didn’t really have any hobbies. She didn’t think she was an interesting person. She knew she wanted to live now, though. Now she wanted to have some fun. Personally, I found Elizabeth very interesting.
“I don’t know,” she sighed. “I’d find it strange seeing a woman as a priest. You know, we don’t need women working in every sector.”
“Yes, we do,” I said. Surely if the Catholic Church is to continue serving generations to come, and if its congregants continue to take what they are told by the clergy more seriously perhaps than any of the other authoritative voices in their lives, we will need more than just celibate men answering to the sins of their congregations.
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For the final Easter Saturday service of the retreat, Elizabeth and I walked the Holy Mile together. We took a detour to look down into the valley, the cool fields spread out beneath us. Even in the three days we’d been here, it had all gotten greener. Beside me, she breathed out. “How can a person see all this and not believe in God?” And then neither of us said anything for a while until it was time to make our way for the last night at the Basilica.
“How could all that not be created by a God?” Elizabeth had asked while we looked out over the countryside from the Holy Mile. Turn the frame, catalog the rolling tragedies this year alone, and you could just as easily say, “How can a person see all this and believe in a God?” You can find a God in everything, and everything will always look pretty godforsaken, too.
The two-and-a-half-hour-long Easter service was divided into two acts. In the first half the Basilica was kept dark but for our candles as we continued to mourn Christ’s death. At some point I noticed my fingers growing hot and looked down to discover the half-moon card there to catch my candle’s wax was on fire. I blew on it, but that only spread the flames further. People were turning around to look at me now, breaking from their singing. My hand was so hot I let the candle drop to the floor, imagining for a moment what would happen if I burned down the Basilica on Holy Saturday — another Anglican plot to destroy the remaining English Catholics. Elizabeth was shaking with laughter beside me by the time I had finally put it out with my shoe. I put the leftover shard of ashen card in my pocket.
Then a priest cried out theatrically, “He is risen!” and everything in the Basilica turned electric. The American student swapped her black lace headscarf for one embroidered with bees and flowers, the other women and I all embracing each other, the shroud over Walsingham lifted for another year.
Back at Dowry House we partied with the nuns till midnight. They’d put up Easter-themed pastel-colored bunting and provided us with endless cakes slathered in thick icing, bowls of sweets and chocolates. “They’ve got such sweet teeth,” Elizabeth said, pointing to where the sisters lingered around the fizzy drinks table. “It’s a wonder any of them will be able sleep tonight.” The sisters did seem more joyful than ever as we sang Easter hymns a cappella under a simple crucifix nailed to the wall. “You don’t technically have to go to Mass tomorrow,” they told us. “We will, obviously, because that’s our main thing.”
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On my drive back to London, it was very hot. The most sun England had received all year, in what would become the hottest year on record across the planet. “How could all that not be created by a God?” Elizabeth had asked while we looked out over the countryside from the Holy Mile. Turn the frame, catalog the rolling tragedies this year alone, and you could just as easily say, “How can a person see all this and believe in a God?” You can find a God in everything, and everything will always look pretty godforsaken, too.
As I drove, I started thinking about celibacy. What would happen if I chose never to have sex again? But why make that choice? It wouldn’t be for religious reasons. I wasn’t looking for a religion that would require me to give up sex. I guess I would like to protect myself more emotionally. Throughout my 20s I kept getting hurt, and causing hurt, in relationships, by way of infatuations. I kept acting in ways that seemed alien to myself. I would also get more writing done if I forswore all dating, I thought.
The truth is I am not choosing to live a million ways. Each decision I make shuts down a whole host of alternatives, just as Isabella’s choice to become a sister has. For a while I had been dating a couple, at the same time as seeing other people. At first I had thought that such an arrangement might be a way out of the bind — that it might ensure me against the possibility of a diminishing life as I got older and other people settled into nuclear families. But this hadn’t proved the case. When I told each new person I dated that I was also seeing a couple, it put particular limitations on what we could be together — not just limitations of time, but limits on my capacity to step towards them wholeheartedly, for them to do the same with me, when I felt and they knew my attention was half elsewhere. I missed as many versions of my life dating the couple as I would have as a result of any other relationship.
And yet, and yet, the distinctive pains and joys involved in each attempt at loving someone offer us important lessons about how to look after each other better. The scars love leaves you might have value if you do not neglect them but learn how to treat them.
Back in London, I cycled over to a house where a bunch of my friends were celebrating the heat-rush. Their barbecue hadn’t worked, just smoked and smoldered. There was music playing. All their feet were dirty because they’d been playing volleyball barefoot in the park. I was so happy to see them. How could I look at them and not believe in something good?
It was still Easter Sunday. “OK, listen,” one of my friends asked, ‘who rolled away the stone from the tomb?”
“God, I think.”
“And who actually saw Jesus risen? Like, where’s the proof?”
“Women. It was three women who had come to anoint his body,” I said. “Listen, in the car on the way back I had this weird thought that maybe I should become celibate.”
My best friend rested their head on my shoulder. “I don’t think that’s it,” they said gently, the two of us looking out at all of our friends around us with the sun coming down behind them. “You’d miss out on so much.”
Excerpted from Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever (Bloomsbury Publishing, May 2025), © Lamorna Ash.
✺ Published in “Issue 28: Spectacle” of The Dial
