I have been home about six weeks now.Well, five if you take into account that the day after I got home I left to visit friends in the UK for a week.
It still feels a little unreal, in a way. I spent two years working with the same bunch of terrific people, meeting the same wonderful friends at the same favourite bars, and now that's all over, gone. That's a weird feeling. I know a lot of people talk about life being a series of chapters and how things change, but I think for a lot of people that's a smoother, more gradual process. When you're someone like me -and I refuse to call myself a traveller, as that conjures up images of someone living out of a backpack and scuba diving and getting one of those real, traveller tans -and that's not what I do. I move to cities and I find an apartment and an ordinary job and I meet ordinary people and do ordinary things. And I love that! I love ordinary. But sometimes people confuse air miles travelled for adventurousness. So I don't ever call myself a traveller, I call myself a mover. And when you're someone like me, a mover, you get used to the chapters ending abruptly. Most of my chapters have ended the exact same. My dad picking me up from the airport. My mom making a big fuss over me and asking me if she can make me a sandwich. Us all in the kitchen joking about how the dog still seems to remember me, anyway. It's the exact same every time, and the similarity is more remarkable than the frequency.
The first few days are all novelty. The first bag of proper chipper chips, catching Reeling In The Years on TV over dinner, the first trip into Penneys that I've been looking forward to for months. And then it normally gets old very quickly for me. Even if I have psyched myself up for the return home, the enthusiasm usually fades within a week. I'm not going to talk shit about Ireland. I've been asked a hundred times by a hundred different people why I keep leaving, and I don't think I've ever done a good job of explaining myself. I have just always been happier when I'm elsewhere.
And now something has changed. And for the first time in my life, I don't have a plan to leave. My cards are laid out on the table and I don't have any more visas or one way flights up my sleeve. And I like it.
Or at least in theory, I like it. In reality, I have barely seen any of my friends -that is the few friends I have that are still in Ireland - and I am ridiculously busy with work and more stressed than I have ever been in my life. I'm also paying more for rent in Dublin than I have ever paid in any other city, while making less money than I've ever made in any other city, but shur, what can you do and all that.
Still, having a job and a place sorted within a month of getting home isn't anything to complain about. Seeing friends -and, perhaps more importantly at this stage, making friends will hopefully come in time. And with no plans to leave, time is one thing I have plenty of. What I know is I'm very happy to be here. I want to get to know Dublin the way I knew Chicago, I want to spend weekends exploring it like I did Seoul. I want to become as nostalgic for the Liffey as I am for Lake Ontario.
And it's already happening.
