Ireland, at first

It’s even drearier than I’d imagined. The rain comes in all directions, profoundly grey and as cold as it’s possible to be, short of redeeming itself as snow. It howls upwards from the pavements, forcing itself under every layer of clothing, under boots, under hair, under skin and into bones. A perpetual aggressor leaving me wind-burnt and teary-eyed. Coming into pubs a ragged kind of survivor, wet-haired and numb-faced and gasping for a drink. This is Ireland. I’ll have five pints of Guinness, please, to bring me back to life. 

The sensation of somersaulting through some kind of existential storm doesn’t let up entirely for my first month here. The days are filled by transit, packing and lugging bags from airports to rental cars to Airbnbs to friends’ houses and trains and buses and cabs. Dublin to Wicklow to West Cork. London to Kent to Galway and back again to Dublin. Packing and unpacking. Rifling through piles of irrevocably crumpled garments to find the same pair of jeans I’ve worn every day this week. Meeting new friends and new family, going for dinner and brunches and pints and pints and pints. Falling into bed with my new love. My heart on fire with this love. Utterly exhausted. 

We wake up to stomachs off and necks cricked and a sickening kind of dizziness, like stepping off a merry-go-round. We meet friends and their friends and a million people they’ve worked with. We watch their films and go to their shows and celebrate their work and shout about them on social media. I learn the names and professions and histories and storylines of too many people to keep from tangling and blurring together. A viral pandemic is declared. We go for dinner with parents and lunches with parents and pints and pints and pints. We make love five times a day. We live in each other’s pockets. We crave a home.

The sun breaks through for moments, brilliant blue and crisp but only for hours, never for days. The city of Cork uplifts me. I think it uplifts him, too. He begins to uncoil, and for me, the sense of tiny and disparate threads finding their way into conversation with one another. A home. An income. What I want from my life. The possibility to choose, again. The dreams I had to put away for now, acknowledging them at least, that they exist. Surrendering to this freefall from which I am, miraculously, being caught. Being loved in the most disarmed and disorientated condition imaginable. An undoing through which I can begin to feel a kind of vitality emerging. The kind of creativity in which nascent life eventually braves again after an old thing is dismantled. 

Rain and sun at once as we come down the hill from a home that finally feels like ours. A rainbow materialises over the river Lee like some Disney phenomenon. And for once I can feel a tendril of belonging. Can picture ourselves putting herbs in the ground here, and harvesting them in the summer.