Memories are less like postcards and more like three. Second. Snapshots.
I remember Northern Ireland like that. I cannot point to things that happened during that trip that changed my life, but it has carved a space for itself within my cranium nonetheless. Before the end, this “essay” will most-likely turn out platitudinous: a postcard. Here I sit, languid in the late afternoon sun, and moments drift back to me. Listen to this, dear reader.
Coruscated light dapples the the graveyard, adding to the impression of ground-moss as dull chartreuse blanket. We are in Northern Ireland, and tall the graves are Protestant, English, incomplete.
With the excitement of ten year old youth, I buy Phillip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife, the third installment in his trilogy kneeling on the smooth crystalline floor of an airport bookstore.
Eating corn beef hash in some musty inn at two o’clock in the afternoon. The hills looked greener than ever through the window. Time moved slowly while we ate (and the adults drank.) There was an air of inactivity to the whole affair, and the afternoon was to unfold in a leisurely manner. It didn’t matter.
The foam of the frothy sea curling and crashing against Giant’s Causeway. The stone pillars of octagons jutting perfectly beneath our rapid adolescent feet.
The ruins of a castle… incomplete… themselves fragments.
My friend’s grandfather talks of Eschatology in a dusty room with a window overlooking the sea.
I am jerked violently back into my present tense as the memories stop cascading through me, though the tides continue and continue. Full stop.