Meeting Myself Again

The last few months have resulted in a new world vocabulary. You probably don’t need reminding, but here goes. Lockdown. WHO. The new fucking normal. Cocooning. NPHET. Pandemic. Quarantine. Self-isolate. Zoom. Zoom bombing. Front-line workers. Just wear the mask, the mantra of the true believers who worship at altar of NPHET, Leo, Simon and Tony.  Hopefully words we’ll get to burn when this is all over. Flatten the curve was an early one. Flatten the bleedin’ world more like. Stay safe, stay home and stay the fuck well away from me whatever you do. Not forgetting the latest one, the circuit breaker. But for me the one that deserves to rot in hell more than all the others is staycation. Let’s just say it well and truly deserves whatever is coming to it. There’s more than the ring of the civil service to it, safe and unbecoming of the intrigue and the joy to be found in this magical land of ours. In places like Mayfield, the Burren, West Cork, Mountjoy, Connemara, Ballymun and all along the Wild Atlantic Way reaching from Dingle to Donegal.

This exotic mix of who we really are and who we want to be and everything that lies in between. The ghosts that walk and stalk the land going back to the Great Famine to the War of Independence right up to a time when we finally decided that to be different in Ireland is okay, referendums bringing a new kind of freedom that is threatened again, now. A time to die, a time of growth, all this fear caught up in something called hope. Lockdown felt like we were starting all over again with a sudden end and a new beginning pointing the way ahead. Suddenly we were locked into finding out who we really are. No wonder we were shocked when we looked in the mirror and saw someone else looking back. We were forced to step back into ourselves whether we liked it or not. Stepping back in time, we had the chance to meet the person behind the mask again, as individuals and as people. Stripped back, naked and bare, as helpless as the day we were born. We kicked and screamed and when it all got too much we flicked Netflix on. If only it was that simple, this time of reflection, loss, grief, shame, guilt, confusion and uncertainty with all the doubts that brings. The virus meeting with Cockney rhyming slang to become the Miley Cyrus. I’ll be keeping that one if you don’t mind.

It was confusing and months later it still is. But less so now that I can look back along the road that leads from that day in March when the society closed down as suddenly as a massive heart attack. Days when we learnt to thread carefully with what we said and what we didn’t, we tip toed across the graves of others, the earth still settling on their dying day. They died alone, like we all will in the end. The quiet funeral leaving those left to fend off the grief with some wet wipes and a dry blackthorn stick. We did our best to stand upright. The heart beating wildly with excitement with the thought of making the trip to the shop across the road to buy a pint of milk. This was the time before masks. Into the shadow of the valley of death we stepped wondering how many of us would make it out the other end.

The response to the Miley Cyrus was like a wrecking ball, but all the time an endless blue sky floated above us to remind us that good things were still happening. It has asked serious questions of us all. Are we ever ready to face death? Have we talked about it, thought about it, smoked about it waiting for the the ash fall. We asked questions of ourselves and others. What good is a life if we cannot live it? It’s like we died a little bit more everyday, but then we’ve been doing this since time began, Long before the virus showed up, we’ve been rushing around in a desperate attempt to catch up with what we didn’t know because we never ever had the time to stop and ask. Life was sucking us dry until the virus screamed Stop! Suddenly we had the time to step back and listen to what was behind all the noise.

We were forced to take a moment for ourselves, a moment that lasted six months and stretched well beyond the pale. It seems to be something we have forgotten in this sudden desperation to stay alive, words lost along the way like vitamin c and vitamin d, the immune system left to fend for itself as if drugs are the only way. The keyboard warriors holding sway. I checked the phone too much, until I finally learnt to put it away. It was June when I finally left the news to itself. There are better things to be doing in terms of your mental health than listening to that bollix everyday. Tony. Leo. Simon. Donnelly and outraged from Donadea showing us just how unkind we’ve become to anyone with a different point of view. One of the most worrying trends has been the labelling of anyone who challenges the government narrative as a conspiracy theorist. This need to shame people into compliance turning the country into a giant school of righteous indignation fuelled by the daily figures of infection and death has challenged our free will.

Time makes us sit still in a chair looking out the window at a world that has stopped passing by. We’re all the same now. Still. Silent. Forgotten. Thoughtful. Wondering what we will find when we peel the mask back. We read book after book. We watch film after film. We sleep, wake, cook, eat and look for rhythm in a day that has none. Until slowly a new beat establishes itself remind us of where we have come from. It’s slower and softer. Slowly we begin to notice that the only thing that has changed is everything. Even loneliness has a different feel to it, like it’s even more separate, more real. Time reaches out to hold our hand and helps us to sleep at night, this easy presence called change slipping under the sheets beside us like a long lost lover looking to make amends. I’ve learnt to listen to the darkness.

Whatever it is, space, time or silence has stopped us in our tracks and forced us to find a different path. Maybe it’s a glimpse into a future when machines will do everything and people will have more than time. Maybe only then will we realise that we destroyed ourselves as well as the earth. In this space we will have to find new ways of connecting. These are the lessons we will have to take with us when this is over. I sit with my doubts. I hear the words of Skinny Love for the first time. I take the arrow and hold it in my hand, before I pull the string of the bow taut and place the arrow carefully in its grip and take aim. Once more I am a little boy playing Robin Hood in the forest near our home, floating free in memory and imagination, and when I turn and look back I see my mother’s smile, content in my happiness. It takes me back to sunny days that never seemed to end and I know now, they never did.

Dead or alive, I will go to the ocean when this is all over, for this is where we all go when life we are done. I will drive to some place like Dingle and listen to the kind of silence that comes with the wisdom of the world wrapped up carefully inside. I’ll go there because it contains an emptiness there that can never be filled. It is only time that chases us away and it is only in the stillness of places like this that we can find ourselves again. I will listen out for the birds and the whispers on the wind from times passed and I will think of those who died of everything during this time and I will think of all of those who did not and I’ll write all those bloody words on a piece of paper and light a match behind some ancient rock and lift it towards the page so that it catches light, the flame spreading upwards until it’s time to let go. I’ll watch the breeze taking it out to sea where the words will spread out and lose themselves in their own importance until they are lost and gone forever. Staycation my arse, be gone!

The ocean calling them home, as I realise that deep in the middle of all this I stumbled upon a new friend I had lost somewhere along the way.

It was myself.