The Priest in the Posters

Julien had fallen in love with Élise first through music.

They were both in their twenties, both careless with sleep and serious about old pop-punk bands that other people had long since abandoned. She loved a particular group with a fervor that delighted him at first. She knew every lyric, drew fan art in the margins of her notebooks, and could lose an entire evening in the strange little worlds people built around singers and songs. Julien thought it was endearing. He liked that she loved things loudly.

Then her fascination changed shape.

It began with a fictional version of a famous singer—René Vale, in some fan stories, reimagined as a priest. Julien thought it was an odd obsession, but harmless. He laughed when she mentioned it the first few times. Then she mentioned it again. And again. Soon René-as-a-priest seemed to surface in nearly every conversation, as if her mind had found a single shiny object and refused to let it go.

At dinner she would scroll through pictures of him dressed in a collar and dark vestments, grinning at her phone as though the image itself had become a private joke between them. She gave him nicknames. She asked Julien, half teasing and half serious, to imitate him in bed, in the kitchen, in the mirror. When he tried, awkwardly and reluctantly, she would wrinkle her nose and say he wasn’t convincing.

The apartment changed too.

Élise had always liked decorating with handmade posters, cutouts, and bits of paper she printed at work. Julien had once found that charming, proof of a mind always in motion. But after the priest obsession took hold, the walls became crowded with it. A black-and-white portrait pinned near the stove. A collage of cutout faces in the hallway. A paper halo taped crookedly above the couch. The apartment they had built together began to look less like a home and more like a shrine assembled by an excited stranger.

He told himself not to overreact. She was still working, though less diligently. She was still kind, though more distant. Irritable, too. She grew sharp whenever he asked about the fixation, as if his concern were an insult.

The one time he truly frightened himself was when he took down a damp poster from the kitchen wall and threw it away. Water had ruined it, and he assumed she wouldn’t care about a torn scrap of paper.

Two hours later, he found her in the kitchen, staring into the trash.

She had been searching for it for half an hour.

When he told her what he had done, her face collapsed. She looked as if he had betrayed her in some irreparable way. Tears came fast and hot, and she did not speak to him for the rest of the day.

After that, he started wondering if perhaps the others were right—maybe she was unwell, maybe this was something beyond a harmless obsession. Yet she didn’t seem manic or detached from reality. She didn’t ramble about impossible things. She simply seemed occupied by something he could not reach, something that had slowly edged him out of her attention.

He tried to talk to her gently. He tried not to sound accusing. She became defensive. He became hurt. They circled the same argument until neither of them recognized the shape of it anymore.

Then he made the mistake of posting about it online.

He had meant to ask strangers for advice, maybe reassurance. Instead, the story spread. Friends mentioned seeing it. Then Élise saw it herself.

She came into the living room furious and humiliated, her voice shaking with the force of it. She accused him of exposing her private life to strangers, of mocking something he had never bothered to understand. He tried to explain that he had been scared, that he had only wanted help. But she had already gone cold.

She said the internet didn’t live with her.

When he brought up the possibility that she might need help, she laughed without humor and turned the knife back on him. She compared him to the very fantasy figure he had spent weeks resenting, and she did it with surgical cruelty, naming all the things he had never thought she noticed and delivering each one like a sentence.

He felt himself unravel.

In the heat of the argument, he gave her an ultimatum. Him or the priest.

She looked at him with a kind of exhausted contempt and said, “It won’t be you, anyway.”

That was the moment something in him gave way.

He packed a bag, took the train to his mother’s house, and sat at her kitchen table pretending to explain why his life had taken such a ridiculous turn. Even as he spoke, it felt unreal, like a fever dream recounted by someone else. A year ago, he had thought he knew the woman he loved. Now he had only the walls of an apartment papered with a stranger’s obsession and the echo of a sentence he couldn’t stop replaying.

He did not know whether the relationship could survive what had happened. He only knew that he was too tired to keep standing in the middle of it, asking to be chosen over a man who did not exist.

And for the first time in months, he could not bring himself to listen to those old songs.