darkness on the edge of town

I get Friday night euphoria, maybe as a habit from coasting to the end of an all-nighter and wanting to burn up all my remaining energy before the crash. In Westport, it's strange, because I don't know enough people to find company whenever I want it, and I don't want to lean too hard on the people I'm getting to know.

Coming off a week where I doubted my future here and then secured it as home again until the end of February, I felt a surge of love for the town and a surge of premature sadness after coming close to packing up and leaving it. I wrapped up warm and walked out to the quay, to sit drinking takeaway tea and watch the harbour channel lights blinking red and green below the stars.

I like the kind of bravery that's about stamina, about coping with change and loneliness and knotted inward challenges. It was never clear in Dublin how much the ambient threat, especially living in the Liberties, hemmed that desire in. I did walk through the city alone at night, walking just to see the streets and pass by people as they lived around me, but the threat is so much lower here that I can sit alone and isolated at night and know it's not asking for trouble. Loneliness seems very little about actually being alone, and more about feeling anchorless and cut off - I felt the same loneliness surrounded by friends and in a relationship as I do six months after moving to a town where I knew nobody. It's not a shortcoming.

I am an embarrassment when I love something or someone. It's frequent but it's never hyperbole: it's a rush of sentiment and a giant, messy, throbbing heart open to the world, and things are wrong when that stops.

In town, walking up into a vertical row of streetlights and buildings, nobody passes me without saying hello; I pass nobody without saying hello.

I came here thinking of it as escape and recovery, maybe recuperation - time to be by myself and step away from having my days full and from chasing heartbreak. It felt like anything I might care about would end as a lesson in "this is why we can't have nice things", and that was true at the start but it's changed. Having the chance to think about the rest of my life as a continuum rather than as a peak followed by decline or chasing to meet milestones, I am now wondering if this might be more than a place I visit, and I realise I'll get to choose.

I walked out to the quay listening to M. Ward, music that (aside from She & Him) seems like it was made for me and fits in a niche in my heart carved with just it in mind. Poison Cup is better the four-hundredth time than the first (A sip or a spoonful won't do - I want it all). To Go Home hit me in the gut tonight. I walked out to the quay with a surge of emotion burning off like I was putting it to use; I walked out to the quay walking hard.

Maybe just one more - Chinese Translation. And I said, what do you do with the pieces of a broken heart? and how can a man like me remain in the light? and if life is really as short as they say, then why is the night so long?

--

Greendale has the most amazing map, the answer to the love letter to Westport I wrote in September/October. It's an enormous, beautiful thing and I think it'll be crawling deeper into my heart for a while. I think you need to see it.