Table for One

How do you measure time? I've been in Ireland for one shampoo bottle, three small loads of laundry, six batches of cookies, about five hundred cups of tea, and one haircut's time. I've been here for one branding by the fireplace (three symmetrical marks on my back where I leaned against the grate) and one irreversibly damaged white shirt that does not belong to me (sorry, mom). I've also been here for three hundred and sixty episodes of Friends, and about as many embarrassing moments in public. I can tell that I've been here for a significant amount of time because I've started memorizing the songs they play in Zumba, and I no longer have to step gingerly off the last stair in the hallway because my body knows how many steps to take to get to the bottom. The bouncers at the Roisin have stopped asking to see my i.d., and the barista at Café Luna says hi when I walk in the door. I'm a regular.

And I am alone. The strangest thing about being here is the fact that even when I am surrounded by dozens of people--all smiling, drinking, chatting, or some indecipherable combination of the three--I am by myself. It makes no sense, and yet it makes perfect sense: I am the furthest away I have ever been from home, my comfort zone, and all the people whose knowledge of my daily idiosyncrasies makes us gel without either of us knowing. No one here knows me on that level, and as a result, I'm the one who is getting a peek into it. I am alone. I walk and dream and eat alone; I go to Café Luna on Monday afternoons and I buy my produce from Mr. Beans on my way back home. I spend my money on chocolate and dried fruit and I know how to get the best deal from the olive vendor at the Saturday market. I am accountable only for myself; last night, I asked myself what I wanted for dinner, and I made it. Afterward, I put an apple in the oven to bake and watched the buttery juices bubble out of it into the pan, sizzling away, releasing a gorgeous cloud of cinnamon into the air every time I opened the door. No one ate it but me.

The thing that this alone time is teaching me, most of all, is that things work in cycles. I woke up on Saturday morning and felt inexplicably sad. Maggie was on a field trip to the Gaeltacht, and I knew the shower was going to be cold. Two hours later I was at Renzo, doing research for my midterm when Erin came to cheer me up: she pulled a banana out of her bag, pretended to make a phone call on it, and handed it to me. Two hours later, I was happy and smiling--I was alone again, but this time I was listening to good music on my ipod and splashing in puddles. Two hours after that, I was crying. Sometimes the desire to write swells up within me like a balloon that I have to get out, and other times my journal gathers dust on the shelf and I don't want to explain myself to anyone or anything. Nothing, nothing, nothing lasts.

That evening we went to the Crane Bar to listen to music, and every room was jam-packed. I left the group at one point to stand upstairs, and just as I walked in, the bartender silenced the room and one of the musicians sang an original song--the kind of heartbreaking one that slices through normal sound waves, the kind that gives you goosebumps that don't go away for hours. We walked from there to Taffe's, where Chris et. al. dragged us to Carbon, the new club that opened off of Shop St.--and when the rest of the group ran ahead of me, I walked in alone. The club was filled with smoke; not the cigarette kind, but the fog kind that comes out of a machine at the beginning of Cirque du Soleil. On the dance floor, without so much as a bonjour, a tall French boy who smelled of soap kissed me on the tip of my ear and asked me if I would like to move to Paris. No thank you, I told him, and bolted. I do want to go to France someday--it's just that today, I'd rather be alone. I began to leave by myself but Chris wouldn't let me, so I thanked him and we shared my bag of pistachios on the walk home.

I've decided that the purpose of this trip, at least for now, is to teach me how to do this. The business of being by myself is something that I never got good at before, not at Scripps, not ever--even when I thought I was, I wasn't. I still love people more than anything, and sometimes listening to Alyssa describe the latest episode of Glee is all it takes for me to jump from mediocre to fantastic on the mood scale; but I needed to know that I could be this way too, drinking a cup of coconut tea and listening to the boys kick the soccer ball around downstairs, flinching each time it bangs against the wall.

Today would have been mine and Jeremy's third anniversary. I thought seriously about calling him about a dozen times and then even more seriously about buying myself the entirety of Tesco's stock of Cadbury chocolate, and decided against both. I sat in the stairwell in the library for thirty minutes and cried because I couldn't find my scarf and couldn't find the exit, and then when I finally managed to make it outside, I saw Nick from Writer's Society leaving Aras na MacLeinn: he had a mustache drawn on his face with marker, and I became inexplicably happy. Nothing lasts. I wrote a little poem, listening to the beat of my feet on the sidewalk on the way home:

I wake up every morning and
the song remains the same,
A tiny bird that thrashes at
the windows of my brain,
Reminding me that if I can't subtract,
I'd better add.
"You only want,
You only want the one you cannot have."

And when I arrived, there was a package waiting for me from my mom. Ferry let out a "yeeessssss,"because he knew that it probably had chocolate in it, which it did. Luckily, he and Higgins were far more entertained by the bubble wrap, and I was able to escape with the candy--which I demolished, upstairs, all by myself.

And there you have it. I've been here, at this spot, for one thousand, one hundred and eighteen words. That's approximately 600 more than I currently have of my Women in Irish Society midterm...which, let's face it, is what I'm really supposed to be doing.