writing_shadows

He told me once that he found old buildings comforting. They were, some of them, as old as him, if not older; a reassuring constant in a changing world.

But as my feet find me walking the streets of Ballinasloe, I realise with some sadness that these churches were all erected after he left this place.

I do not know why I sought his church; I have long fled my own.

I think, perhaps, I had naively hoped to find this place as untouched by the world as him; a pocket of Ireland preserved in the dusty unworldliness of times long past, long before I was even born.

Forbidden is the word he used.

One does not become a heresiarch on the technicality of a word.

Perhaps that hurts more than anything else; because I think he knew it as well as I did.

The countryside here is beautiful, it’s true. And if I close my eyes, I can almost imagine him walking this road, his footsteps laying the foundations for mine some two hundred years ago.

I think, though, that even in the peace of one of these little cottages, in the company of books and artefacts and that endless sky, I would have grown restless. Perhaps I would have given in to wanderlust, always returning here a little more jaded, a little more broken. Perhaps I would have taken him with me, uprooted him time and again, house after house but always home in his arms.

Perhaps it would have been I who broke his heart, in the end.

I court sorrow in all my nights, but I do not indulge in it myself as deeply as I ought. Perhaps, in seeing how cruelly I can wield it against others, I have learned rightly to be afraid of it.

Who could stand in the face of this emptiness…

And not be filled with terror?

If I stepped back into my car now, I could perhaps make it to the border by dawn.

I find, though, that I am not yet done.

And so, instead, I sink down on to one of these benches, the brisk sharp wind buffeting against my bare calves as though I might feel the cold, not half as cold as I. I eye the brightening sky with a sad gaze, matching grey for grey. Across the road, I spy the face of a feral cat peering out from the shelter of a car, watching me in turn, and a poem drifts to mind, murmured in a soft Irish lilt as the ghost of a forlorn memory strokes the curve of my cheek.

And I am grateful for small mercies, that no one walks these streets this hour to see me cry.