I spent my first night in Dublin awake.
I crawled out of bed after several valiant attempts and sat on one of the blue couches in the living room, facing the balcony and its huge glass windows. Our view overlooks the River Liffey, and further, Hueston railway station. I looked out of this window for several hours and tried to reconcile the glowing "IRISH RAIL" logo, neon and piercing in the night, with my increasing sense of isolation and disorientation. For long moments I could simply enjoy the view, but without fail a sense of malignant alienness would enter me, like a full body shiver. I felt not just alone, not just far from home, but that I had lost my place, somehow. If my life was like a spool of thread, quietly and subtly unwinding at regular intervals, it had now been cut. It unfurled in disarray.
The problem is that my entire education and acculturation, everything I have ever been told and told myself, insisted that life was never meant to be improvised. The particular privilege of my education, of my parents' education, meant that I could take certain things for granted. In another, far more likely reality, I'd be in LA, or applying to JD programs, or, or, or.
But I had gone off-book: I had mislaid the script, I no longer remembered my lines. The plot of my life had suddenly become unintelligible to me. I was in a new country with no real ties other than an imagined, unrequited sense of kinship on my part. I was halfway committed to a program of genuine academic inquiry and halfway committed to a cross-cultural vanity project that would be of little substantive interest to any serious academic. For the first time in my life I had no guesses as to what came next, no notion of which questions were pressing or what tasks should come first. I had lost touch with the perennial and the urgent, the frivolous and the new. What task came next? What plans should I set in motion? Where could I get a duvet cover?
We constitute ourselves, in part, through narrative. At least I do, and that often requires me to presuppose a conclusion: one I could no longer reach. I had believed, before I left, that moving would be an instantly gratifying, affirming and romantic experience. Much like a tampon commercial where the menstruating woman bounds and leaps across a meadow filled with daisies into a new life of self-esteem and freedom and easy-to-reach conclusions about her life's purpose.
This did not happen for me.
The days after moving are a process of deteriorating health and frenetic anxiety. There's a total endless loop of running errands you didn't anticipate running, a brief and guilty moment of reflection, followed by more bodily neglect and a growing, festering awareness of all the things you have to do. This loop is punctuated by near-orgasmic reveries of a time when these errands will be over, and your life will really begin in this new place, now in earnest, because surely this feeing will pass and the dream you've had, of a life and character renewed and exalted by your crossing this academic and geospatial frontier, this will be rewarded in spades.
This waiting and the fantasies, equal parts happy and grim, are constant, incessant. They wear you down. You wake in the night only to think how comfortable you should be, how free of the old burdens you ought to feel, and you wear circles in the hideous carpet that never seemed like a big deal before you arrived, when it was all just pictures and bragging rights and not the surface beneath your feet.
That carpet comes to represent everything that is wrong with what you've just done, everything you've just miscalculated. It is hideous and torpedoes the room, and you know this deep in your bones. Just as you know that the city you've moved to is experiencing inflation unlike anything you've seen, and is a potentially violent and grim place just a few blocks from you, and that you don't know anyone there, not really. But you think these are complications easily avoided, or else that you are an easygoing sort of person and will not mind, or that being a girl of slender means may just be the kind of exercise in Romantic struggle you are searching for. And then you discover you're wrong, about all of it. You are actually uptight and crotchety and anxious; you cannot stop checking your bank statements; you can't sleep with that horrible, no-good carpet staring up at you.
This realization shocked me, and then embarrassed me. I found myself thinking that the only solution was to stop being exactly the kind of person that I am--someone who is anxious and scared and often upset--and instead pretend that I'm an entirely different kind of person. At least until the feelings of dread subsided.
Here are some things I learned. A nice method of faking that all your actions are deliberate and well-reasoned is to simply keep moving. Being on the run is a good way to make sure no one looks at you closely enough to see how scattered you are, not even yourself. I divided my days into thirty minute increments like I was leveling flour, exploiting every second, avoiding stillness.
At the first pub I visited--a storied, wood-paneled place confusingly called Nancy Hands (I kept hearing Nancy's Hands)--I ordered and sat down with my new housemate. I subtly ushered us home just before the conversation could slow, just before my body realized how alone we were: that this bar may as well have be empty for how little chance there was of anyone speaking to me, and that actually, as it so happened, the bar was emptying and that we were then the only ones in the room.
That's how the whole city felt to me at first: if not sparsely populated with a dwindling and passive interest in anything having to do with me, then utterly, ludicrously empty. Which is why I was always leaving places just when I arrived, flirting with possibility without getting too close. I always made sure I had an assignment to get to, or a shift, or a call with some client at an unreasonable hour. Or that I had flights booked to another country (Sweden, a story for another time), just so I could play tourist and have a ready-made excuse to leave. Tourism is a great way to be alone in a new place without having to admit you have no friends, without feeling as ill-adjusted as you actually are.
There is a passage I love from one of the books in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet. She describes a moment of arrival, where Elena (the female protagonist) is introduced by another character to a group at a party. She writes:
"He was absolutely the first person to show me in a practical sense how comfortable it is to arrive in a strange, potentially hostile environment and discover that you have been preceded by your reputation, that you don't have to do anything to be accepted, that your name is known, that everyone knows about you, and its the others, the strangers, who must strive to win your favor and not you theirs."
This kind of reception is an orgasmic fantasy for someone like me, who pretends they care very little about most things but secretly wants a red carpet rolled out under their feet. How thrilling it must be, to feel as if the conditions of acceptance have already been met. How lovely to sit and watch others come to you, to know your presence taken without question.
How many more times in my life would I be obliged to rediscover how to be pleasant and normal? In the first few days of my time here I was invited to a picnic. About 20 or so young women--all new, unattached expats--sat around on a blanket on the ground and laughed nervously at each other for an hour, desperately searching for a person or two who would rescue them from their personal abyss. It was strange to sit there, interviewing potential lifeboats. There was a pecking order, certainly, some criteria I feel I missed or others didn't match for me. What would it have been like if we had all been like Elena at that party--self-assured, intentional in our speech, unwilling to lower our standards for fear of being alone? Would it have been any kinder?
Luckily, the wounds of friendship speed-dating heal. My body has started to crave rest again--my mind, absolution from its self-delusion. I've covered the carpet, mostly, with two cheap IKEA rugs that wash out some of that electric blue. I bought a candle, and a hairdryer, and I made a new friend--organically, this time. Yesterday we watched some swans pick the detritus from their wings, and found something to talk about.
As September rolls on I can't help but think these moments will grow on me. Maybe I will miss this time, when I couldn't calculate any moves or find a place for my next footfall, when I simply had to wait and observe and wish for the best. Perhaps in time all these moments of being lost will reveal themselves as a kind of holy nothingness. Perhaps I will wish I did not try to conceal this vulnerability as strongly as I did.