23:03 –
I have spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to only get certain blog posts to display on certain pages. The smug euphoria is unlike anything else I’ve experienced this week.
I am back in Dublin in my happiness box – the small, sublet of a room I’ve lived in for two and a half years.
I cannot stop thinking about the 39 – was it 39?? – people who died in the Mediterranean over the weekend. I feel guilt not knowing if it was 39 or not. I feel more guilt knowing I will not look this up right now.
Mildly dehydrated after crafty cans on the canal with friends. An illicit cigarette just because I can. I am supposed to return to Cork on Monday. There is no way I’m going back.
I am a sum of the unwritten letters I have composed to TDs, MEPs, influencers.
I am wearing the same nautically-striped shirt I stole out of my younger sister’s clothes donations black-liner bag in the second week of lockdown. My bedroom smells of the Sri Lankan curry I didn’t want but ate reluctantly for dinner in my post-pint starvation. I washed it down with rice crackers slathered in tahini. It wasn’t the pizza I wanted but it satisfied.
I am thirsty yet incapable of the trek downstairs to fill a water bottle, boil a kettle, nab a biscuit from the cupboard.
I made it three minutes and thirty five seconds into the second episode of Mae Martin’s Feel Good before actually feeling like I should be doing something else.
I’m doing this instead.
My Twitter feed announced this morning that Micheál Martin is going to be Taoiseach. I wonder how this happened. I bemoan my apathy; I pray for the Greens. Articles are flying around saying direct provision will end in the lifetime of the next government; I remind myself to read up on the developments before composing another invisible letter.
I feel like I should be having sex right now.
I have six unread messages from six separate chats on my phone. I need or should respond to all of them.
I have ten days left in my job while, as we speak, a certificate of citizenship that should guarantee me entry into another continent is winging its way through various postal services to me.
The cans this evening, in the dazed light of humid, migrained summer, were beyond words. I have been in complete denial about just how much I’ve missed my friends, my happiness box, my canal, my disgustingly overpriced coffee habits, my life. I have spent the past weekend wanting to consecrate every moment in this sacred kingdom. I am forgoing sleep to take it all in; I am high on the air here, the freedom, the latent joy still fizzing in the memories made. I have taken to sketching in notebooks, scribbling abstract descriptors down in the hope of catching all of these moments. Once banal, now precious in the knowledge they will be ending soon.
It is 23:14 and I am sorry that this is boring. I’m sorry this is not for you but for my future self – the woman who might someday forget about the tiny yellow room, the day she wore luminous purple active wear to cycle to Clontarf in 7am drizzle, the Belle and Sebastian album she couldn’t go a day without, her obsession with oat cakes, rice cakes, any kind of cakes, the evening spent needing to pee yet reluctant to leave the colourful friends and cackled conversation by a Tuesday Phibsborough canal. The woman who might someday doubt if this was all real; if she really was – is – this completely happy.
Now, I should go to sleep but will instead make tea, scrounge up something sweet, read Karl Ove and lament everything undone while quietly toasting the victories of my small today. Is there any other way to live?
Earnest & Ethereal 