Aisling
I have lived in Dublin, Ireland, for two years working as a writer in a publishing company. While my head was turned ordering a pint, as I daydreamed in my cubicle, or while walking home through deepening shades of evening, something resembling my own life took hold here. I'm not a Dubliner; I'll always be "Matchew from Canada" to my friends and co-workers. My flat mates will likely never stop asking me, "Now, Matchew, do you have that in Canada?" regarding everything from microwave ovens to pornography and sunshine. Still, there come nights, watching the sun wheeling west—the moon in close pursuit—that I feel a pang of missing, remembrance; find myself consumed by the names of places and people who are past and gone.
It seems I'm most awake during the dead hours of the night, when the wind moves on the shoulders of the ghost-legions lurking along the Grand Canal, when the din of distant drunks rise like jungle-cries; as an insomniac paces the floor above, an argument flares in the flat below, and rain falls everywhere outside. Coming home, glowing drunk, clutching a frozen pizza under my arm, still laughing at stories told around the table at the Gingerman Pub, Slattery's, Mulligan's, my mind reflects and tabulates, guessing backward at years, and names of people I thought I would never forget.
I was born in Windsor, Ontario the summer Marvin Gaye was singing, "What's Goin' On?" A city that gets altogether too much stick for being small and slow and industrial. There's probably no point describing my childhood and adolescence there to someone who faults a small city for not being a metropolis: strumming a battered acoustic guitar in my room, shooting hoops at the schoolyard, roving the neighborhoods with friends all those Friday nights in spring. The beacons of my landscape light with neon intensity: Sacred Heart elementary school, the riverfront, Ambassador Bridge, the Dominion House Tavern, the Grad House pub.
After finishing school I was never more aware of the pang that has always been with me—double-edged and incorrigible: exasperated with Windsor while there, missing it desperately while away—bellowing through my nerves the ancient words God used to banish Adam and Eve, "Gird your loins and get the fuck out!"
So, I moved to Dublin and discovered a truth I thought only existed in fantasy: that a man could live and work and enjoy himself in equal proportion, free from guilt, stain, persecution and undo molestation.
After another night at the Gingerman Pub—where a friend asked me, "Silicon breasts. Now, Matchew, would you have that in Canada?"—hearing the shouts of drunks along the Canal, there's no temptation to rhapsodize about home; I am too familiar with Windsor's nicks and dents and frayed seams. Even so, these stories are mine, and so is that city huddled on the Detroit River, watching the water flow past, and life extending all around.