Nonfiction | On Leaving

How I Left My Cottage in Mayo

My cottage is almost empty and I am leaving in a week. The turf fire burns but the place is a shell. I have boxed up my books and pictures, my clothes and perfumes. My lamps and a basket of things on the table, I haven’t been able to pack, in case I need them. The same goes for an old lipstick I might put on now, notebooks, pens, a cable I’m unsure about, it might be for my blue tooth head phones, it might be from a phone I used five years ago. I found dried flowers above the boiler. I have put them in little dishes on the window sills so my landlord knows I care about the space I leave. I care. But I need him to know that I do.

There are things, as I have packed, that I have kept shifting around, unable to look at directly. There are things I have boxed which I haven’t looked at properly for ten years. A box of letters, a box of writing, boxed again for my next place. I know I am going to Italy for a month. I have driven all the boxes to my parents' house in Oughterard. I know that is a lacuna, a space which is given to me, and for that I am grateful. I drove for the third time from Killawalla to Oughterard today, the third time with a car full of things I don’t really know what to do with. My books are the only things I really need, but I know this is also a lie. I need a home. I just don’t know how to build one. I am 35. I don’t know where I want to build it. I know only that it is not here and my heart hurts. It hurts for the man I am leaving here too. He wants me to stay. But I can’t. I can’t because something far more powerful than my thoughts and my selfish heart has told me to leave.

I felt myself slipping today as a I drove through the pinks and blues of an unimaginably beautiful west of Ireland sky, far above the mountains of Connemara. I felt a looseness, a selfish force in the way I live gnawing into me. I listened to a podcast, I rang my sister, and still I felt like I wanted to stop, to run the car into a tree, to end it here, because to go again seems like insanity, and to stay seems like the same thing, but slower, surer. So, shall I stay with the promise of oblivion coming in on a breeze, or to leave in the hope that in that new chaos something different, surer, will present itself, even when I do not even have a dream of what that is? This is the meaning of blind faith. Without a God, it is a lonely thing.

This might be a better story if I was doing something different from my usual. But this is what my story says I do. I come and I go. I try and I leave. It is very hard to hold my centre in conversations because everyone who loves me wants me to arrive in the right place. I smile, I cry and then I whisper here, that I am never doing the same thing, that the world revels itself more and more terribly as I move though it. That we have no control. That control is beginning of the rot. I learn this. I am humbled.

I live in a burst of feeling. So often, unrequited, I am forced to be alone with all the fantasies the world can give me. Every player, I want to be them all. It has taken me a long, long time to share myself. To actually be with another person, like a place, and I thought it might be here, with him. He lives in the burst. But this cottage in Ireland is not my home. It is my dream of home. It is a place I dreamt of as a child, an imagining of earth and sky, walls, a bed, an oven, possibilities, possibilities of freedom.

Here, I have found, once again, myself. My boxes, my clothes, my habits, my longing, longing, for something, let me go there, I said, and here, with no one except him, and I found him here, I find myself coming and going. We will try and stay together across this space I am creating. We are either greater or less than our circumstances. Time will tell.

But I am not thinking any more, I am going. And when I have to think, I smoke a cigarette or I pour a drink. These things hold the ease of God, and for them I am deeply grateful. I am grateful as I descend, keep descending. That, perhaps, is the tragedy.