If I Insist

Have you ever played that game 'I have never...' where no one can actually keep straight when they're to stand up or stay seated? Where all of a sudden you second guess yourself about little things like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and if you wear shoes on your feet.

I just finished my last week as the official 'kitchen helper' on DCM summer campgrounds. First, after three days of training, came Junior Teens, followed closely by Junior Girls. Then Senior Boys, Senior Girls and finally, when I thought I had nothing left, Junior Boys in all their sweet-little-adorable-dirty-faced glory. I will never be able to look at a red bell pepper again without the muscles in my right hand aching; nor remember the look on that small, round face as the little bit of pepper was spat out in utter disgust and the sound of the laughter that followed.

I'm sitting here eating spaghetti bolognese with lamb mince, listening to a flatmate's music playing behind me, compulsively running my fingers through my hair and waiting for my brain to subconsciously come up with a clever way to make the Greyhound website accept my debit card and send me on my way to school.

I'm about 99.99% sure that the fact that I'm sitting in a small, overheated room overlooking the beautiful and twisted city streets I've been wandering through for the past (almost) two months hasn't fully (if at all) sunk in. My mind is continually running a few days ahead of myself, trying to keep up with the mess of a schedule I so easily fell into step with.

A couple hours ago, I did something I've never done before. I walked through doors I'd never dreamed of crossing and came back through the other side alive. Each moment I spend in this land of chaotic, peaceful bliss is another moment of becoming something I have no control over. The question I put to myself is not whether I will be pleased with the outcome, but rather what I will do with whatever the outcome turns out to be.

In a little less than two weeks, I will once again be on a small piece of aluminium, travelling much too high, much too quickly over the unbroken expanse of ocean water bellow. My sister always used to tell me how she left a small part of her behind, whenever she left a good town or a much-loved country. I will be leaving a part of me here in the cobbled streets and mucky liffey with the rain falling in a continual pattern that sounds more like a lullaby with each passing day. But I'll be taking something with me in exhange. A little piece of a lifetime that will fit into the gradually growing picture of the existence I was born into.

Today last year, I was watching my life fall to bits in front of me. What was really happening was something a lot more along the lines of da Vinci getting his paints ready for The Last Supper. I know this person - you know the type, the kind the says exactly what you don't want to hear, exactly when you don't want to hear it - and I can only guess at the amusement it causes up in the heavens when I try to run away from the open arms that are waiting for me.

I have never... travelled on a real live train, been kissed by a boy, broken a bone or choked on a cherry pit. But I have flown over the sea to another continent, held in my arms a sobbing child with a breaking heart, watched the budding blossom of a beautiful romance and lost everything to gain everything I'll ever need.