(Be) Longing
From there, not from there.
It’s home but it’s not my home. I feel a tingle in my arms, a tightness in my diaphragm.
What do I miss?
I miss the taste of salt on when I lick my lips. I miss being able to look out at forever. I miss the wind through my hair, feeling the sting on my face. I miss the connection to feeling that this place gave me. It felt like freedom and it felt like a place I needed to run from. And I did run, to the ends of the earth, as soon as I could.
The people part ruined it for me. At the time, I couldn’t see the good. Too many years of bad.
Not bad…horror.
Daily, hourly reports of the worst things that humans can do. My parents were, and are, news addicts. Not sure why. Maybe there was a need to know what was happening at all times? My dad would watch the breakfast news, the 6pm news, the 9pm news, sometimes the 10pm news, if he wasn’t asleep on the sofa.
If we were in the car, the news was always on. Actually, he had classical music on mostly, but on the hour he would switch to the news. And it was NEVER good. Ever.
Someone had been shot, someone had placed a bomb, someone was taking ownership for an atrocity. I never understood why they were so keen to claim it as theirs. Shouldn’t they be bowing their heads in shame? Shouldn’t they be sending themselves to a dark cave in the forest to banish themselves from the rest of us? How could they do that?
How?
Just so much hate. And in a life of daily horror, some were even worse. Shooting people at a funeral, a mob surrounding soldiers trapped in a car and tarring and feathering them. Omagh.
Omagh.
Rivers of blood running down the street.
Closer to home, my next door neighbor checking under his car with a mirror to make sure there wasn’t a bomb. Every morning, I’d see this from my driveway as I walked towards the bus stop for school.
Normal. normal. normal.
Normalizing fear. Normalizing pain. Normalizing destruction. People’s lives ruined in an instant.
I couldnt’ stand the humanity. So I left.
And now, I can see the beauty. The place itself. I didn’t allow myself to feel the irishness of it. To drop into the very essence of the land. The land got forgotten in the race to divide it.
As a protestant, growing up, I never felt allowed to be Irish. Plus my parents were from Scotland. Even more, you do not belong here. We were not taught Irish at school, unlike at the Catholic schools. We were sent to ballet lessons, Catholics to Irish dancing. You can not identify with the irishness of where you live. When I went to university in England, I was friends with some second generation Irish girls from Manchester who knew all the words to ‘The Fields of Athenry’, I had never even heard it. How could I be from there but not?
Living in America, I’ve lost count of how many conversations that start “Oh, you’re from Ireland??! My great grandfather was from there. We’re Irish!”. So keen to proclaim their irishness and me, so quick to clarify, “No, not Irish, Northern Irish”. A little less Irish. More British? More this weird, in-between ‘not allowed’ to be Irish. Like it felt like a false claim.
As I sink into this period of my life, I feel this pull towards the place and the land. Pride is not something I could ever allow myself to feel about where I came from. The shame of what was happening and had happened and how people had behaved was too loud. Drowning out the beauty.
But the land, the mysticism, the stories, the music, the call of seagulls, the rocks disappearing into the ocean as stepping stones to another land. The singing green of the fields, the newborn lambs in spring, the crumbly, moist feel of peat between your fingers. The soul cry of creativity, art, that hadn’t been mine.
And yet, it has shaped me into who I am. It swirls around me, like tendrils of smoke.
It’s calling me home.