juno slept here

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When my father wasn’t losing me, I was chasing after him. I think the poets call that γλυκύπικρον. Sweet-bitter.

by KELLY WEI

layout CHIARA BOYE & XANDRIA HERNANDEZ photographer ALYSSA OLVERA stylists JOSEANE TEJADA & ESTHER DASHEVSKY hmuas AMBER BRAY & JANE LEE models LILY JAQUES, RODRIGO COLUNGA PASTRANA & MARIE BENNETT

In Rome, you can’t go two blocks without running into the shadow of God. When my father took me to Europe for the first time, I was 17 years old and angry with him. We arrived in Italy in mid-July, and by then, had already walked through many of the great Romantic cities, making our way along the Mediterranean waterfront — all the while speaking, I remember, very little to each other.

I noticed the piety of southern Europe early on. In every city we visited, amidst the blur of galleries and museums, main streets full of tourists and back alleys where bar owners stepped out to smoke, churches became baseline buildings. My father and I visited a number of them — La Sagrada Familia, Duomo di Firenze, St. Peter’s Basilica, and at last, the Pantheon, where I had stood miserably in the faint circle of light beaming from above, through the oculus, and looked up. Everything was beautiful, and it cracked my heart in two. I think the poets call that γλυκύπικρον.

Sweet-bitter.

“When my father wasn’t losing me,

Broadly, I was angry with my father because he left and never really came back. That summer, however, I was specifically angry because he had a habit of, literally, leaving me behind.

It was hot, and bus fares were cheap, but my father and I agreed that the best way to experience the cities was to walk through them. I meandered and stalled, intensely observant of the sun-baked streets, the quaint cafes, and the old couples in the park. My father, by contrast, strode on with urgent purpose and a 20-page itinerary in hand, looking for grander and more important things to show me.

Our first day in Europe, he lost me in a crowded Spanish square after I had stopped to listen to the music. When the man in the street finished his song, I’d applauded and turned to my father, only to find him gone. I had no money, no phone service, and only a handful of Spanish phrases I’d picked up from school. When I found him half an hour later, he only blinked at me, perhaps never noticing I was gone at all.

Variations of this instance happened over and over again: in museum halls, in grocery stores, in the labyrinthine streets of every city we visited. When my father wasn’t losing me, I was chasing after him, knuckles white on the hem of my sundress as I kept my eye on the shape of his shrinking back. Him and I, forever 10 paces apart — and in non-physical metrics, probably further than that.

Up until I was in high school, my father would fly down from Boston to see me once or twice a year. He’d book a hotel, we’d see a movie, and I’d accompany him to the Chinatown barber. Then he’d leave again on Sunday morning, dropping me off at the Blockbuster for Mom to pick me up.

When I was really young, he told me strange bedtime stories — mythologically intertwining real people I knew with characters he invented. None of it made sense, but I listened raptly all the same. I liked his voice because, more often, he was quiet. Quiet in the corner of the hotel room where he worked on his laptop, quiet in the car, and quiet for months stretching into years as I grew into a young woman, out of his sight.

I was chasing after him”

In the Pantheon of Rome, following our guided tour, my father and I once again dispersed from one another; him to scope out the exhibitions and admire the technical architecture, me to walk in listless circles and slouch in the pews, unspeakably sad.

Unspeakably, because I was too scared to be anything but angry out loud. All summer long, I’d trailed after him, biting down hard on things I knew better than to say. Dad, slow down. Dad, can we just sit? Dad, tell me another story. To suggest I felt something more than resentment was to admit that I wanted a biological father after all — and want was the most shameful feeling of all. But I did.

I desperately wanted this man to turn around and come back for me. Just once, I wanted it to be different.

There is an opening at the highest point of the Pantheon dome, where the light comes in soft and wide. I hadn’t meant to move toward that circle of light, pooling on the marble floor from above, but I did. Like something from Heaven, the sun set the tone for the rest of the temple, washing its floors and columns in warm shadows.

How could men have made such a thing? The Pantheon was a beautiful and exemplary feat of architecture — but it was also surreal to me that an empire could toil at building something of such grandeur and awe for years, all in the name of silent deities. How could you know any of it was real? Gods you couldn’t see, creatures out of your control — what sort of masochist pledged his devotion to such forces?

“Oh, there you are.”

Religion encourages humanity to bare its best and worst faces, and the elaborate sites we construct in the name of our gods are testaments to their hold over us, believer or not. Whether we want to believe or not.

My father stepped into the circle with me, blasé and understated. Most times, I could hardly believe we were related. He was a physicist with a doctoral degree in data science. I was a moody American teenager who read Anne Sexton. But something in the way he looked up at the oculus reminded me of myself. Maybe he was thinking about Rome, too, and the impossibility of religion. Maybe he had come to stand next to me because he’d been wanting to all summer, or even longer, but didn’t quite know how. Just like me.

“It’s beautiful,” I said impulsively. “Sometimes it’s all so beautiful I want to cry. Does that make sense?”

Even the most rational generals of Rome made tributes to Mars: men would cast their sacrifices into fires on the eve of battle, blood dripping from hands and altars, and sing hymns in a bid for glory. King Agamemnon had sent his only daughter into the flames to appease Artemis, believing she would change the winds and allow his men to sail for Troy.

Such acts of insanity, but we do it — for deities whose presences in our lives we can never be sure of and whose capricious natures forever elude us. If you never see God, and He never sees you, is your religion real? If I could never catch up to my father, and he could never turn around to see me, was I his daughter in any sense of the word? Or was that mythology, too?

My father looked over at me, and I couldn’t explain the expression on his face, only that I’d never seen it before. It was subtle, like all other facets of his character, but I thought he seemed taken aback. Struck.

“Yes,” he said, after a pause. “It does.”

Why do we believe? In divinity, in love, in fathers — in anything at all? Why do the pious, but the sad and broken, too, come to places where Venus sings, and Juno sleeps? Pleading, fearing, seeking, weeping. Laughing, watching, waiting. Waiting for God? For the line to go through?

I don’t know. But I am drawn to all of it.

When you leave these places, something follows you out the door. It’ll wash away if you aren’t welcome to it, sapped back into the otherworld from whence it came. But if like me, you are the sort of person who chooses to believe in it, you might invite the feeling to linger, to nest, and to affirm what we all secretly hope to hear:

All will be clear. All will be seen. ■