It’s 4 am. Well, 5 to 4. I’m tired-wired. Both physically exhausted and mentally alert.
I do not choose the time, the time chooses me. And anyway, the time is always wrong.1
Yesterday was full. A trip to Ennis to see Laura. And on the bus up, a chat with Michael, a resident Brit from the rough part of Tottenham who inherited a house in Kilmihil from his “spinster aunt” (a term spoken with affection and gratitude).
A jovial gambler, he loves film. And talking to people about film. We had met months ago on the same bus route up to Ennis and we talked about his favorite film (The Usual Suspects) and Mark Rylance’s star turn in the Spielberg film Bridge of Spies.
Returning to The Usual Suspects, Michael reminded me of his favorite line and the way Gabriel Byrne delivers it: “There is no coke!”
You had to have seen the film for this to land because its all about context. As are most references. If not the context of origin, the context in situ. The context in and for the person who is trying to communicate their meaning to you with the tools they have available: the rich possibilities of metaphor afforded to all of us in and through art.
As a rather referential person myself, I relate to this man and I humor him. I listen and connect.
We talk about his low-key winning streak of late (always a number or two away from the big bucks, but still nothing to sniff at) and how he wonders when his luck will stop.
“When’s the wheel gonna turn?” I said with a smile. Picturing the Wheel of Fortune from Ricardo Cavolo’s Tarot Del Fuego deck.
“Yes! Exactly!” He said, “That’s a great line!” And then he went on to say that maybe the luck runs out when you stop doing your karma. Like, when he stops giving back to the universe the generosity he’s been given, it ceases to appear.
He didn’t ask what I thought, nor did he need to. But if he had, I’d have told him that maybe karma can only cover so much. That we are not always responsible for the chaos that screams its way into our lives.2
We talked about his brother and my mother and their respective health problems.
We talked about where he grew up, his favorite job working at a bar in the small Spanish city of Cuenca (where his now ex-girlfriend then lived), and how it was there that he picked up not only language but also the quirks and idiosyncrasies of culture and custom best learned on-the-job in service.
There he learned how to be Spanish in a way, not to mention how to mix drinks and how you’re not supposed to pour Johnnie Walker Black as your base for a whiskey and coke. Best instead to go to the well.
We talked about his favorite subjects in school growing up—English and History—and how he might’ve failed if he’d been forced to apply himself to much of anything else. Lucky for him, he was secondary school track star so he was allowed to coast until he could shine.
We spoke of our mutual love of cafe life and the promise of an open day stretching out in front of us with nothing much to do but saunter from one cup of coffee to the next.
Within no time, the hour between Kilrush and Ennis had passed with ease and we both walked off the bus knowing we’d made a friend.
Laura was already at the station waiting for me, had arrived by car some ten minutes previous. We hugged, laughed, figured out the cryptic system of parking payment and walked to my favorite nearby cafe. 3
We didn’t have long to catch up, owing to each of our pressing afternoon engagements—doctors and busses and whatnot. But it was so lovely to see her. After we got our coffees4 there was no seating available (the cost of quaintness) but it was a dry day and we walked the few yards to the grotto in the middle of the road, hemmed by silver-painted iron gates on either end. 5
The perimeter benches were uninviting so we took a seat on the low stone steps. All watched over by a beneficent stone Mary who had once appeared to someone there, right on the spot where we sat. And from that marriage of time, spirit and geography came a fork in the road. A holdover from a bygone era of devotion. Retained by the stubbornness of superstition, all the while being dragged into the godless future.
The money spiders flocked to us as we sat with our brown paper coffees. I felt like a spider traffic controller, constantly redirecting them with patience and care, from Laura’s hair or my body, to the ground.
Later, walking to the bus back home, I saw Damien. The busker from Dublin who lives around the corner from us in our small coastal town.
Ever since we met him outside the local SuperValu a few weeks back, I’m seeing him everywhere.
When I saw him yesterday, he was walking away from the station as I was walking toward it on the opposite site of the road. His eyes fixed on some invisible horizon, guitar on his back and steps heavy with purpose.
To tell you the truth, I’ve been haunted by our meeting since it happened. Not in some ghastly way, but in the sense that I was moved by him, by the moment itself, in ways I find difficult to articulate. It lingers, tugging on my shirt sleeve, asking me to notice.
Outside now, the sky around me is bluing. Slowly sloughing off the dark shade of night.
On the table in the yellow lamplight my temporary page marker. A relic from 2008—a paper on which I had typed (on an old thrifted typewriter) lines I wanted to remember, wanted to keep, wanted to hold. Because of their meaning to me, something I felt without it needing to be understood.
One of those lines eyeing me from the table is this fragment from Pablo Neruda’s Tonight I Can Write:
Tonight I can write the saddest lines. / Write, for example. “The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.” / The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Even now it is related to me, here on this morning so far from the day it was typed (by me), even farther from the day it was written (by him). On this morning, with its deep blue sky huddled at the edges of waking.
Back to meeting Damien.
On the whole of late (read: the last few months or so) Chris and I have not been getting along. We’ve started seeing a therapist. And she’s great. We’re making progress. We’re learning tools to reconnect and co-regulate.
Today I woke up feeling connected to him again (even in the wee hours) for the first time in so, so many days. We both couldn’t sleep. He encouraged me to get up and write.
On the evening we met Damien some weeks back, we were getting on and we were out for a late evening stroll by the marina.
Damien was busking outside the door of the SuperValu on Frances Street, a handful of small change on his black guitar bag, singing Oasis songs.
I dug around my little coin purse for all the change I could muster and gave it to Chris who loves giving money to buskers. He placed it on his bag with the other dull pieces, and Damien sang: “Maybe, I don’t really wanna know / how your garden grows / ‘cuz I just wanna fly…”
“Live Forever” is a song I don’t know well, but Chris does, and he began to sing along. As he did, Damien, singing with the pure, clear voice of heaven, like the gramophone of god, turned his body toward Chris. Eyes closed, bloodied fingertips leaving little red flecks on the body of his guitar. Guided by their mutual resonance, their shared love, in this small communion.
Passersby and late evening customers looked on the scene with a mix of confusion and pity. Like, look at those poor suckers. But I don’t think they were seeing what I saw.
They were seeing an unstable drunk long barred from the shop he was singing in front of luring in the new folks and parting them from their late-light hours and pocket change.
But I felt like I was witnessing god. That I was in the presence of a conduit, a mouthpiece of eternity. A phone call from the mystery at the heart of all things. An act performed with perfect feeling.
The cost of which appears (at best) to be a sacrifice of any hope of normalcy. When you’re mainlining the source, there is no fitting in with the careful, quiet 9-to-5-ers.
After he finished singing, we chatted. I can’t remember his exact words now, but he said that love is everything. That from love there grew a tree, and from that tree there fell a seed, and from that seed came Damien.
He said that love was music, or that music was love.
There was a peace on his face contradicted by the scars on his arms. The long, vertical one on his right between elbow and wrist, tattooed over by a two-inch treble clef. And all the thicker, shinier little crosshatches on his left. As if his spirit was trying to rid itself of the troublesome fact of his skin. Without realizing that without any skin, his spirit would have nowhere to go except back into the undifferentiated sea of everything.
In that moment, I could see the pure beauty of perfect feeling and its manifested cost. The fairytale bargain on a small town Saturday night.
In his full-throated dedication, I could see what I am (even still, even now) afraid to give.
I was filled with a mix of admiration and fear. A desire to bear witness to this moment that would not be again, and to turn away from the shining mirror being held to my own face.
I looked away before too long, unable to hold the gaze of my own stagnant gifts.
Asteroid City, 2023. Spoken by Stanley Zak as played by Tom Hanks.
See The Tower card of any tarot deck for a suitable visual shorthand of calamity.
Go for the coffee, stay for the lemon and coconut beauties. But good luck finding a seat.
And had a quick chat with the inevitable—not to mention wonderful—heads you run into everywhere you go in this small town which is mistakenly dubbed a whole-ass country.
a picture of the grotto, from Google Maps, for your reference.
I'm so glad to read your beautiful writing and know a bit of what life has brought you. This was a wonderful piece ❤️
“As if his spirit was trying to rid itself of the troublesome fact of his skin. Without realizing that without any skin, his spirit would have nowhere to go except back into the undifferentiated sea of everything.”
Wonderful