This movie is eerie and propulsive and really the worst thing for you right now. Even just because your eyes are hurting from all the colors. But because, also, whenever you watch this movie, you feel all the love in your whole body getting exorcised. These nuns look so clean, but still, they are going mad with lust. And it's weird. You shiver a lot watching them—can't stop shivering now—stop shivering—stop. And the way you can't help but twist around in your wheelchair. Like, you are trying to watch this movie for what it's saying about the thin veil between piety and eroticism and for its evocation of colonialism as a sin against nature and for the cinematography and for that one man's tiny beige shorts when all the sisters are shrouded in the most glaring white. But everything in you is like: No, you mustn't. Which is not even remotely how you talk. And you hate yourself for never remembering to ask the care aide to turn on the lights before she goes in the afternoon—which you should because you live near the top of a mountain, and she is never not late driving back up for her second shift—so here you are squinting at the flashing eyes of these half-hysterical nuns in their wind-blown habits in glorious Technicolor in the early-evening black of your house. And you suddenly feel a kinship with these nuns because you are going to be lonely no matter what you do. And because you hate this Valentine's Day like you hate the silence when you come in from outside, when you have no way of anticipating the next time you'll be able to go back out again—leave this place, abandon your power wheelchair to the small burrowing animals who would use it for shelter or to the coming surge of weeds desperate to overtake the machinery of your life, barrel down the mountain again, have the sun warm itself on your face again—and the TV screen is just there, no matter what, protruding from your living room wall all still and dark. And you would leave this movie off longer, not fall into this movie again and again, like you are right now, but the wind this time of year warps itself around your old house with the solidity of a bedsheet pulled tight, tight, tight. To hold you here. To keep you in place. To bear you up lest you plunge downwards. For there is a great precipice inside you now, beckoning, savagely, inch by inch, calling you angel of light.


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