It’s 2021 now and the pandemic is worse than ever. I’m back in Ireland, and what’s more, I’m stranded in a fever dream of 1920s island life. Is it blindingly pleasant. It is so achingly pleasant that I have been in an ecstasy of sleep, gorging myself on the blandest possible foods and cups on cups of regular tea. I eat three meals a day now, which is up from two, and yet they are small - almost too small - with no spice to speak of, so I crack my wrists on the salt grinder morning, noon and night. To be entirely honest, this is mostly because it would seem there is no spice to be bought for love nor money on Achill Island, and if the history of my life has shown anything, it is
that this is an entirely plausible occurrence in the west of ireland, and
that the line between literal and figurative truth very often either does not exist or matters so little it may as well not and so I relinquish my desire for literal spice - equally so as not to tempt fate as not to overtax my companions.
Every morning at breakfast, which I eat now, we pore over furniture catalogs and discuss the virtues and seasonality of tiling, the reliability of workmen in this part of the world, and the proper side of a field in which to situate this or that indigenous flora. I don’t know anything about plants, but the enthusiasm with which I pronounce the words “we” and “our” is met with an emotionally bracing nonchalance, and I find this blasé attitude towards my inclusion wildly encouraging. Orla’s parents have a single glass of orange juice every morning, and I find this poignant beyond measure. When Orla and I wake up too late there is no more coffee in the pot, so I have tea, and am grateful that there is a routine for me to have missed.
The first two nights here I slept on a camping mattress on the concrete floor next to the woodburning stove, while Orla and I painted the bedrooms during the day. The cottage has four rooms, of which two of them are bedrooms, and one is a combination kitchen-bathroom of the type that constitutes the pizza hut/taco bell of celtic tiger extension architecture. Which is, hilariously, a thing. The beds arrived one after the other and were assembled each afternoon into pristinely empty rooms. Through a process of painstakingly considered inhabitation, in which not a single aspect is taken for granted, the cottage has begun to resemble somewhere that people live. And if you stare into the stove too long, just after a hot whiskey, you can start to see how.
In this process I have discovered that I am not a complainer, that I do not mind being put to work, and that somewhat perversely I enjoy the small, repetitive processes that constitute building a home for someone else. Out here in the wind-battered bog where I would not and will never reside, they don’t remind me that I have nowhere to live, and even provide a stubborn kind of evidence that I am at least capable of contributing to domesticity. I don’t mind that these tasks are themselves stuccoed with the kinds of multilayered processes of cleaning and tidying up that involve forming opinions on where to leave which dishcloths. I imagine that the people around me find emotional solace in this type of minute control over their environment, and after careful consideration, I find that I do, too.
I have nightmares, still. In the morning I wake up not knowing where I am. Every day at breakfast I announce my intention of setting off alone on an extra-long walk, still utterly convinced of my own bestial freedom, and every day I am thwarted into group participation. Not for the first time, I am learning the sweetness of dependence. I let myself be convinced, and I feel safe.