The Fall

I want to be honest. I want to be honest. I want to be honest.

So let’s get into it.

Most of January and late into February, I spent hermitting. After a particularly long and hedonistic winter holiday, I needed to retreat. So I refused drinks out or coffees with classmates, and spent all my hours indoors. Writing. Reading. Studying. Scrawling shorthand in cheap notebooks with good inky pens.

But after several weeks of this on rinse and repeat, I was growing itchy. Rotting, as the kids say. I needed to crack a window on my life. Or remember that I had one at all. As a matter of urgency, I needed to see the ocean.

So on a Saturday morning, I stood at the street corner near my apartment. Waved my hand out for the yellow bus trundling up the hill. Hopped on. Teetered up the swaying steps. And half an hour later I was in Dun Laoghaire – the sea’s quicksilver-blue cresting ahead.

Outside the central strip, I got off. Naively, I hadn’t brought along a scarf or an umbrella. The clouds were low and thick. The air chilled. And within minutes, it began to rain. Dublin weather is a steely woman. She won’t give up her greys, cries unashamedly, and indulges a bad mood. I whipped my coat tighter and ran to take shelter under the awning of a café. Through the glass I scanned the menu. I thought about getting a hot drink or a snack. Then realised I was saving my coins and my calories for later. Everything is far too expensive here. And my shame costs me just as much.

Realising the rain wouldn’t relent, I marched on towards the pier. On the west of the causeway were a fleet of dinghy sailors out on the water. I stopped to watch them. Admired how each boat moved in effortless tune with the wind. Although constantly at risk of toppling, they were kept upright by the boatmen’s dance – back and forth, over and under, they moved. So seamless. Like a kind of moment-to-moment choreography. So close each boat kept coming to tipping with every turn of the sail, or heady gust of wind, but they never did. And I thought how free those boatmen must have felt – as close to a meditation-cleansed mind as one might ever come. Only this, and this, and this. The only impulse to dance with the elements. To keep the boat upright. To survive.

Photo by Emmy Parpi on Unsplash

At the end of the pier, I wiped the raindrops from a bench and sat. I felt vacant. Apart. I was trying, in some sense, to give in to a feeling that had been building for the last few weeks. A nebulous, swirling sense of… something. Grey, a feeling. No, it was more blue. Blue, the colour of loneliness. But yet it wasn’t quite that. Because I don’t ever allow myself to feel that. So then we’ll call it simply ‘apart’. Put a little hat on it and make it a friend. Like I have done time and time again. My ability to eagle-eye my pain from on high is outstanding. I’ll look down on it, held back by a curious lens: “Oh, that’s interesting. Now work with it. Be grateful for it. Think about what it’s there to teach you.” Spiritual bypassing, my esoterically-inclined algorithm might say.

So there I sat, on that bench overlooking the sea. Breathing in the salt wind. Waiting for some primal wisdom to reach me. And down below, little black birds with orange beaks pecked at the scraggy rocks for limpets or lice. A stray pebble rolled towards the water and sank, soundlessly.

I closed my eyes and tried to settle. Tried to come home to myself. But then a man stood beside me – too close. And a woman beside him coughed. And a group of teenage boys scrambled up the rocks and drew up their hoods and roughhoused and so even then I couldn’t be alone with my aloneness. So I got up – looking for another place to be alone.

I walked back down the pier. Now the boat dancers had packed up and gone home. And the sea had stilled, and was silent. I turned left, passed the coffee van where people queued and clutched their cups to their chests, and then I walked on, taking the path right down to Forty Foot. It was empty. The last of the day’s visitors likely robed and homeward bound, returning to their cars and their kitchens, to their deserved cups of tea and late-afternoon conversations. At my feet, the water chopped and churned, slamming the brown steps with white froth. The wild Atlantic licked my boot caps. The day’s thin light was fading fast. So I carried on.

At the traffic light near the People’s Park, I stopped, looking up ahead at the row of storefronts. At the red lanterns hanging in the window of the Japanese restaurant. The menu written in swirly white pen on the glass. And at the Oxfam, now closed, where a lopsided mannequin was dressed in kitsch velvet.

With the red lanterns in my eyeline, I turned to cross the street. But in a moment, I was flat on the ground. Failing to look down, I’d missed the partition in the street that had caught my ankle. And so there I was, spangled – cheek to tar. Limbs crooked at odd angles. Ahead, two headlights were approaching. The oncoming car slowed to a crawl. I pressed my hands into the grit and picked myself up. The car picked up its pace and drove off.

Then a voice: “Are you alright?”

A woman had seen me fall and had stopped. I looked at her. Then down at my hands. And the ruin of them made the pain come alive – they were flayed at the heel of my palms and bright blood was seeping and I thought

fuck
this
hurts
so
much.

And the tears came up fast in that knee-jerk way, like when a ball catches the back of your head on a sports field. Because it’s the shock – yes it’s just the shock of it – and you’re breathless – just winded just –

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I just got a fright.”

She hesitated a moment. I watched her eyes take me in, take in the dirty patches on my knees. And then she nodded and walked away and I wanted to scream after her:

“Wait – please – could you hug me?”

But of course I didn’t.

Of course I righted myself and again carried on and now, seeing the hump in the road that had caught my fall, I moved up – up towards the strip lights and the red lanterns. But at the corner of the street I bent double against a fence and I…

I couldn’t breathe.

I just heaved and shuddered and my whole body was wracked
when they say
wracked with sobs
that was me
and I thought
goodgodwhereisthiscomingfrompleasemakeitstop

And then came the sound of fresh footfall approaching. Two new pairs of feet. One: the soft, quick pad of trainers. The other: a sharp click of heels. And I slid back against the wall and lowered, down onto my haunches, pressing my bloodied hands onto my thighs to stop the bleeding and to press back against the pain and as they passed me I thought

godiknowhowthislooksitlooksbadnoonedoesthisinpublicnoonecrieslikethisinthestreetnoone –

And I don’t know what was worse – the fact that they didn’t stop or the fact that, after a while, one of them did.

For at first the couple walked past me, pretending I wasn’t there. Making an effort to look away from this wild, crying woman – this leper, this pariah, this ghost.
But then the woman stopped. The click of her heels stilled while he strode away into the night. And she turned and cocked her head at an angle and said:

“Are you okay?”

And I said:

“I just fell.”

And she looked back. Back to her husband who was striding away without a turn of his head. Then back at me. And finally, saying nothing, she walked away.

And still I wept further.

Photo by Kartikeya Rana on Unsplash

Every day in Dublin, I catch the tram. Every day I watch people bury themselves in their screens and bite their thumbnails and avoid eye contact like it’s excruciating to be witnessed and angle their bodies in obscene ways to avoid touching each other. Just today I watched a boy eat his sandwich on the train. So quietly. Bite by tender bite. As if he were a ventriloquist. As if the manipulations of his mouth caused him physical agony. As if each muted chomp of his jaw could help him minimise the most normal of human actions.

And I thought to myself again and again and again: what is the point of it all?

Sometimes I feel so desperate for real human connection that I look around the train carriage like a dumb fool searching for the one person who isn’t on their phone. Sometimes I feel so desperate for someone to touch me I hope a careless walker bumps me in the street. Or a hard elbow knocks against my spine. Or that my fingers graze against another’s when we’re scanning our transport cards on the platform. Or that the stop-start lurch of the tram knocks our knees together so that we can break the silence between us and stop pretending we aren’t all just millimetres from each other, just real live human beings feeling all these feelings or

Is it just me?

Honestly, I don’t know how people stand it. I don’t know how we go on pretending things are fine when they’re not. I want to see a woman lay down her shopping bags in the street and howl. I want to see a child run rampant through a supermarket with chocolate smeared over its face or a man stopping traffic holding up a sign that says: None of This is Real Anyway So Let’s Just Make Love.

I want people to stop pretending.
I want to stop pretending.
I want us all to stop asking ‘how are you?’ without genuine care for the reply.
I want the word ‘fine’ to be erased from the dictionary and –

Okay. Take a breath now, Georgina.

But all of this is on my mind.

And so is this increasingly intense feeling that something is shifting inside me. And it’s physical. My chest has been hurting for weeks.

As a chronically single person, I seem to find myself writing obsessively about love. Maybe it’s because I want to understand it. And now, as I start scoping out a second novel, which (surprise!) centres around an unravelling marriage, I’ve been thinking more and more about what love really means. Not the glorified Hollywood meet-cutes. Or the clichéd stomach flutters.

It seems to me that real love is about being known. Being seen. In all your (perceived) flaws and imperfections. In all your seasons. Seen without masks or guises. Love is about feeling understood. And that’s perhaps why it has always been so elusive to me. I’ve never really known how to let go, or to drop the mask with a partner. I’ve done this with friends, but most of my romantic relationships have fallen short of this point because the thought of really being truly seen terrifies me. Playing it cool. Being diffident and sarcastic and witty and ‘mysterious’ – this I can do. And more recently, a friend described me as “self-contained”, which in a new and refreshing way felt validating and exciting. Because it is true – to a degree. But, in the fullness of who I am, it’s not really me at all.

The real me often finds life just far too much. The real me cries watching a busker in the street because I am so moved by someone’s ability to live out their craft openly and freely in a world where most are hurriedly walking past with their AirPods in. The real me often finds loud music aggressive and would prefer silence to listen out for the birds. The real me is scanning a person’s face to assess the ways in which I might be disappointing them. The real me is probably hiding in your bathroom doing a Wordle because, like a child, I need a timeout. Because my face can’t remember which expressions match up with the small talk I’ve forgotten how to make.

When it comes to love, I heard someone say that love isn’t about falling. You don’t fall in love. Instead, you fall back into yourself. Falling in love is remembering the love that is your original nature. And the person you choose to journey with is that love made manifest in the world. They are the very embodiment of the love that already existed within you. And real love, real connection, is an amplification of that. Real love allows you to become more you.

On my left palm, there are four round red scars. The skin grew back, but the fall has left its mark. Maybe it was a kind of spiritual shedding – letting go of the guises I no longer need, so that I can, once and for all, allow love in.

I’ll put that here because maybe that’s how I’ll make it manifest.

I’ll put that here because I just keep thinking
I want to be honest
I want to be honest
I want to be honest.