Rain in the distance

I could sense her stiffen the first time I touched her hand. Clumsy movement on my part — but I kept going — unable to stop. We were on a Ferris wheel, spinning upwards at a comically slow pace. Swaying ever so slightly in the breeze. Her suggestion, not mine. I was clear to draw this distinction.

I was holding her hand. My own as heavy as marble, disassociated from my body by its awkwardness and its sense of being. It was hard to tell whether she felt this. Maybe I was simply getting stuck in my own head, the gulf between my thoughts and the world around me growing like it has a tendency to do.

Afterward we sat in the Christmas market and drank overpriced lukewarm whiskeys from plastic cups. A group of people walked by, exiting the nearby faux-German beer tent, swaying back-and-forth as if they, too, were seeking each other’s touch. Conversation stuttering into life. The process of allowing ourselves to be seen evolving at an uneven pace, in fits and starts.

I noticed that her watch was broken. Permanently frozen. “The times right twice a day” she said when I asked. I shook my head in wonderment, stored these words away. Jotted them down in a dog-eared notepad full of other half-baked ideas. Started constructing sentences about time, its meaning, or lack thereof. Watched the sentences become paragraphs with a proud sense of satisfaction. The genesis of its simple beginning. A magpie building a nest with stolen, shiny words.

I came back to these words recently, a little irritated by the very idea of them. The broken antique replaced by a new watch, microprocessors and ergonomic design streaming emails and texts directly from her phone. The narrative broken, the arc of the story disturbed. It didn’t matter and it did.

The drive to Ballynahinch in February is bleak. At first I refuse to agree with her on this, but I soon relent. Rain swept bog is unremarkable, indecipherable, swallowing itself up. I’m confident in my own local knowledge — until I realize we’ve taken the wrong turn.

The car hums a long, indifferent to its new route, the roads are empty. The odd miserable looking sheep stares blankly ahead. Shuffles from one spot to another. She says she feels sorry for them. Standing around, soaked. I once wrote that the west of Ireland was God’s country but in the grayness it seems God forsaken.

Carna. Ros muc. Towns that lack the coastal frontier feeling that I’ve always found reassuring. Instead they’re built around peninsulas and stagnant inlets. Forgotten towns until the summer months, when a babble of teenagers are sent to them from all over Ireland to speak Irish. Advertised on a crudely painted piece of plywood is a Saturday Night Fever style disco. Padraig Pearse’s thatched cottage vying with the local Chinese — like everywhere in the world swimming with, and against, outside influence.

We keep driving. Stop briefly at a beach I vaguely recognize from my childhood. Never find what we are looking for in the damp Saturday afternoon. Let it go. Drive back to town, more rain in the distance.

It’s when I let go that I find life is stripped back to each individual moment. And in these moments it’s possible to find a childlike anticipation of what the next one will hold. This can be a luxury and it can be scary in a way I can’t explain very easily.

Time contracts, and expands, and I have to find an equilibrium like a photographer bringing a picture into focus. It’s a balancing act between the narrative and the moment, trying to see both at once. One always obscuring the other.