One Month in Dublin

The city is so beautiful that 

Most of the time 

I feel Dream Dumb

I've spent just over a month in Ireland, two weekends in Dublin and two weekends making my way around the coast. I haven't left the country yet. I wanted to gather my bearings, and I wanted to take time to learn about the place where I was staying. My friends and I have seen the castles and the cathedrals and been to the pubs with jazz and punk and djs and we've eaten stew and tried a Guinness and looked for the deer in the park and overheard people talking in Irish with one another. I've walked around Trinity campus, embarrassed by my casual clothing in the midst of students in their elevated European style, unachievable in its perfect mix of elegance and messiness, smoking cigarettes and talking philosophically on their breaks between classes. I've walked the same sidewalks that Joyce and Yeats and Beckett used to walk, my eyes straying over the city where they gathered much of their inspiration. 

I wanna write someday, for real, but so does everyone I've met in the last month so that dream has become a little daunting. It is both wonderful and frightening that you can share a passion with someone. 

I am curious about the trees here, they look like they're out of a horror movie, the bark rough and knotted, the branches bare, reaching out desperately. I wish we could talk. Can we talk in some eyes-closed, wind through my hair, hand on its chest sort of way? 

There's been a sudden change in the gray cast city. 

In the last few days, while walking around Saint Stephen's Green on my way home from classes, I've noticed that some of the trees are now blossoming, tiny white flowers, parallel to the color of the swans in the pond, telling a different story. I guess one of love. Because when will we ever talk of anything else? 

I went to see a movie by myself last Tuesday. It was the matinee show, so it was just me and a few retired folk, crying over "To be, or not to be," and waiting until the final credits finished rolling to get up and leave. I quite like doing things by myself here. Like taking the Luas to the coffee shop that has the bookstore beneath it, not ordering anything because I am saving for Edinburgh, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Sweden if I can swing it. Figured that I gave myself and the city a month and a week, just the two of us, and I am anxious to see how love shows up somewhere I've never been before. 

There’s a place 

That will make you feel like there is 

Fog above the lake 

It’ll turn you upside down 

Even though you thought you hated being flipped 

It won't bother you 

If you just let your muscles relax 

I thought I'd miss home more than I do. I talk to my Dad at least 3 times a week, don't get me wrong, but I haven't been thinking about my college much, the stretch of road from my high school to my house, the pizza shop my friends and I used to go to after soccer games, playing in the snow. I feel independent, far away from my past self, but I'm writing all the time, so of course memories are always coming up. She's always on my tail. I sometimes feel like I have two different lives, home and here. Before and now. I'm working on stitching those together, finding a through line, taking some of me now home at the end of term.

And dance unapologetically 

And hog the karaoke machine 

We go to gay bars so the guys won’t bother us 

We lay our heads on each others shoulders 

We will only see the way the light hits the windows here twice