Ireland

It has been a difficult thing for me to post to this page. I don’t think I can put into words why. It’s just hard. I don’t feel like a writer. I feel like a fraud. So I spend the hours doing other things; never writing. I hate my job. I’ve been depressed. But tonight I was hit by a teeny tiny inspiration, not an inspiration to create something new but just a wave of courage to post something old. This is merely a journal piece; an unedited journal piece. It might be shitty but I won’t edit it. I am just going to post it below for you to read. The reason I decided to post it is because I miss Ireland. I wrote this journal entry on the plane ride back to the States. I was literally thousands of feet up in the air while I wrote this. I was lucky enough to have a row to myself. I have not edited or altered it in any way since. I think there can be beauty in those things that are completely unchanged from the moment that were recorded. Forgive it for it’s roughness. Truth is rough. Without further ado:

December 12th
Well shit man. This is it. I am on the plane home now. I feel strange and surreal. It feels as if I am (awkwardly) going back in time to what I was before I left. It is kind of like it has never happened at all. But it has and I feel it inside myself. The last thing that I want is for it to be and feel like it never happened at all. Because it was just so amazing. All the late nights, like this last Thursday, staying up until 5:30am and feeling like shit the next day. All the movie nights with the girls where we slowly bonded and got know each other in a way that will make us absolutely keep that bond for the rest of our lives. This experience is something that is different from any other. It felt simple looking back on it. Nothing particularly dramatic happened. And that is why I think it is really and truly strange that it has changed every inch of me. It is just a slight tweak on every aspect of who I am, slight enough that I am still utterly and completely me but just altered…altered slightly but the outcome is significant. I don’t know if all those contradictory descriptors make much sense but it is what it is. I will miss the long walks to the bus stop and the annoyance of walking to Spar for shitty food. I will miss passing by the spire and crossing O’Connell bridge to get to Grafton street. I will miss O’Neill’s and Arlington. I will miss the rain and the long bus rides with beautiful views of Irish countryside. I will miss the kindness of the Irish people. I will miss the non judgmental consumption of copious amounts of alcohol. I will miss shite nite and how they play the same damn songs every Tuesday. I will miss the abundance of really good ciders. I will miss the lovely and enlivening sound of Irish folk music which can somehow lift your spirits even when you’re pissy. I will miss the regrettableness and grossness of Copper’s. I will miss those damn Irish accents. I will miss pre drinking in apartment lounges while dancing to a playlist I meticulously put together an hour beforehand. Most of all of these things…I will miss my friends. I will miss David, Andrew, and Eoin: David and his “Cunt” mug, Andrew and his gym obsession, and Eoin’s personableness and my inability to ever understand a single word he said. I will miss Andrew and his last minute soul sharing. I will miss Patricia: her flipping off of boys and her lone-wolf-chillness. I will miss Marissa: her nerdiness for awesome shit that I also loved and her amazing adorable outfits that somehow kept appearing out of nowhere. I will miss Sarah: her sass and sarcasm along with her love for dancing and really her overall tendency towards excitement leading her to randomly shout. I will miss Molly: her inappropriate jokes, her kindness and level-headedness, and also the way she would always order beef and guinness stew. I will miss Lissy: her fucking hilarious jokes that literally never stopped coming, her writer’s heart, and the truly romantic headspace that she occupied which I occupy as well and found very comforting. All this is why I am altered. From things as minuscule to the atmosphere of NuBar to the way my girls made me feel when I was around them. Boy, how I will miss that city, how I will miss that country, how I will miss those people.

I understand that most of this will not make sense to anyone other than me. Right now this is all I have to give. I know that a lot of it might be shitty writing. Honestly, I think that’s amazing. I think shitty yet truthful writing is lovely. Goodnight. Dear writing God or gods, help me to be a writer who writes rather than a writer who doesn’t write.