What I am now

I take a breath as if it’s my last and follow two girls out the front door of the church with my cousin lagging behind me. I wonder what they all felt after what we had just seen. I squint through the shade trees at the sun and know that today is today and nothing else. There were many days before this and there will be many days after. I walk faster to catch up to them and hear the girls speaking a strange language with a peculiar accent. I decide I need to know where they are from. I need to take a hold of this day, not it to me.
Inside the church thousands of monk bones are odorless and unlike what I had imagined. I lean in and my finger passes through the column of chicken wire to touch a hip bone in a pile of hip bones and wonder how in the hell I ever found this sacred chamber.
This crypt called the Capuchini Bone Chapel displays the bones of over four-thousand monks under the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini in Rome. The church is located just off the beaten path of tourist attractions on Via Veneto near Piazza Barbarini, and even if this macabre display was in the middle of a Piazza many tourist would still avoid it. Some of these monks that donated their remains as an ancient, religious sacrament to the church are still wearing their dark, brown robes. The robes, an itchy color of a dark, strong coffee makes you realize the name cappuccino came from these Capuchin monks, now with their skeletal hands wired together in a praying stance.
My cousin stands next to me, mouth wide open, needing to say something but the disturbing scene with a hint of reverence steals his words. Even if you could talk in this place, all that are here do not utter a sound. I look up to the ceiling and bones are designed into flowing patterns surrounding a cluster of other bones that hang down in a ball of wire. A gruesome chandelier with small lights flickering from within.
A frame on the wall is made of ribs with a delicate design from smaller, finger length bones, within the frame. Everything but the concrete floor and walls are bone, which are a dark, greasy brown, as if the bodies were burned at a low heat to turn everything but the bone into ash.
The sign at the entrance in many different languages asks all to refrain from taking pictures, but I pull my cousin in between me and the woman near the door and begin to take pictures. The side walls of wire are filling with skulls surrounding a lying monk in the center. Still in it’s robe the friar is positioned as if in a coffin, as if to remind us of death while staring straight in its face. On the back wall are three monks bowing with hands wired together. Then I notice the ground, that could have been an ancient battlefield with the many remains unmoved and left for all to view.
Two girls ahead of us see me taking pictures and pull a disposable camera from their bag and try to do the same. They use our model of one stands guard, the other snaps away. I click another and hear voices from home.
“Monk bones … bullshhh …” they would say as I pull out a photo of exhibit A – a column of aging skulls, resembling something from a cheesy horror film. But in real life, here in this instant, I am lost in the empty holes where a set of eyes once were and a life flashes before you. The world swells and shrinks as time spirals. Your life is a blip in the universe. You see someone looking into your empty holes centuries later and so on. Then something brings you back into your own skin.
The girls camera clicks and the flash goes off, sending a ball of light into the chamber and down the narrow hallway. The woman doesn’t notice and the girls giggle nervously. I didn’t want them to blow my cover as the Italian woman would no doubt yell and run us out for disturbing the viewers and the remains integrity and its obvious susceptibility to light.
What is revealed to me is there are six crypts. First, the Crypt of the Resurrection with a picture of Jesus shown raising Lazarus from the dead, and framed with various human skeletons.
The second is The Mass Chapel, to celebrate Mass, but it does not contain bones. It does however contain an altar piece where Jesus and Mary exhort St. Felix of Cantalice, St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Anthony of Padua to free souls from Purgatory. There is also the heart of Maria Felice Peretti, the grand-niece of Pope Sixtus V, preserved here at her request. This Chapel also contains the tomb of the Papal Zouaves who died defending the Papal States at the battle of Porta Pia.
The next crypts are obvious to every viewer. The Crypt of the Skulls, then of the Pelvises, then of the Leg Bones and Thigh Bones.
The final crypt holds Three skeletons. The center skeleton is enclosed in an oval, the symbol of life coming to birth. In its right hand a scythe is held, a symbol of death which cuts down everyone as if they are grass in a field. In its left hand a scale is held to symbolize the good and evil deeds weighed by God when the human soul is judged.
I move closer to the crypt to read a sign written in five languages. The girls ahead of us have stopped taking pictures and are staring at the scales, and scythe, and the sign. I lean in to see what it says. It reads:
"What you are now we used to be, what we are now you will be."