Decline and Fall and

On Rome, history, and what outlives the end of the world.

Driving your minivan past the Pyramid of Cestius which was ERECTED IN A TIMELY MANNER BY THE WAY. Photo by Moritz Kindler on Unsplash

I walked to the Vatican Museum, the night I landed in Rome. I don’t know why it was my first stop. Given who I am — gay, trans, ex-Catholic, never not mad at the Pope, etc. — I felt a little like Captain Ahab making a visit to the Museum of Whales.

Maybe that was the point. For most of my young life, “the Catholic Church” was a cloud of smoke that I moved through. It was everywhere and nowhere — a set of values, a culture, and not a place. Those values told me that I didn’t exist, or that I was bad for existing. They told me to sit still and accept pain in the name of virtue, to strangle my real self in the cradle so that people would love me.

So it was something, to just stand there, looking at a building — a place, massive brick walls, pitted white statuary above the entrance, abandoned barricades where tourists would have lined up to enter during daytime — and realize that I became myself anyway. To stare Vatican City in the face, and say: Nope. I’m still here. You missed.

There were teenagers making out in front of the barricades. This, too, felt important. Clearly, they didn’t mind that they were on the Pope’s lawn; I don’t think Romans really register the presence of Vatican City, just like I never paused to look up at the Empire…