Thin Places

by Kerri ni Dochartaigh

  I moved to Edinburgh, made friends who knew very little of the Troubles of my homeland, found a job that took up every bit of my time and all of my energy. I dragged my coal-black crow of sorrow around like a body in a sack. Now that I was no longer on the island that had broken me, I felt as if I had been offered a rebirth, of a form – a chance to make myself into a thing as light as a candle, as a feather. We are so good at telling ourselves stories that have no feet on solid land. In Scotland, as in Ireland, I sought out wild, ancient and healing places, places that felt full of the promise of new growth. I started swimming outdoors again, as regularly as I had in childhood. I swam in many bodies of water, found stones that made my hands vibrate on touch, zigzagged my way up hills and down mountains, journeyed from island to island, trying desperately to fill my lungs with the fullness of being alive.

  In the daytime, in normal everyday life, during the distracting grind of working Monday to Friday to pay for my Steiner teacher training degree at the weekends, all was fine. I felt like I’d found a safe future for myself through teaching – secure and of my own making. All would be okay now, I promised myself. Then night would come and the veil would slip away. No matter how busy I was, no matter what my life entailed, no matter how much better things looked, finally, on the outside, my inside was still a tangled, knotted mess. I still hated myself.

  All I wanted was to take the way I was feeling and whittle it, to shape it into a thing that I could live alongside and grow to accept, somehow. I would go on visits to Ireland – each of my parents had by then settled within walking distance of where we’d been petrol-bombed. My dad’s second marriage had ended too. Things that have been broken and have never been allowed to properly heal, never been put back together properly are riddled with invisible but devastating faultlines. My family has not been a unit for decades. Suffering and sorrow, when not worked through, lead to anger, resentment and aggression. Or to coldness, lack of contact and burying your head in the ground. It is hard – so hard – to try to imagine a way that any of those things could ever be avoided, given what so many of us in the North had to live through.

  Then, in the year I turned twenty-eight, I began to really and properly break down. It happened slowly at first, then became more and more rapid, without me being able to even attempt to stop it. I would go to work, come home, and straight away close my bedroom curtains and try to pretend the world wasn’t still happening out there. If I stopped going out, seeing people, going places, then time would freeze, and I would have no more worries about my unstable, scary future. If I could just try to stop the present moment, then the past didn’t really exist any more, either; it would become a place that I had never known. I started drinking that year. I see it now, when I have the grace of hindsight, as the ultimate form of giving up: giving up respect for myself, giving up any sense of belief that things might get better, giving up hope. My late twenties went by in the blink of an eye. When my thirties arrived, I realised I didn’t know how to put the pieces of myself back together. There were holes and gaps, like the barren interior of Donegal. Cracks ran the whole way through the map of my insides.

  PART TWO

  Feather and Stone

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Found Things

  HOW FAR BACK, ALONG THE line that is not straight, the line that is not marked, the line that is invisible to our eyes, must we travel, to find the source? Where does the past cease?

  Where does it stop?

  And when?

  Where do you end?

  Where do I begin?

  Where do you end, and I begin?

  Where does the cycle start? Where does the moon take her first white and whispered breaths? When does the sea move away from the land?

  Where does the story step off the page, hope-bright, feather-white, beneath a blackened, moth-light sky?

  Silence, like the moon, is a white circle moving through the seasons, shape-shifting its way across the phases of its own darkness.

  There are places that speak of that unwritten language of letting go, of giving in, of being held like a hand in silent, universal prayer.

  •

  When I left Ireland I vowed never to live on her shores again. I said that I would absolutely never live in Derry again, least of all on the side of the river on which I experienced the deepest trauma. I spent fifteen years living away from Derry, running from place to place, dragging the things I’d seen around with me, like a shadow too bulky for its mirrored form. Today, I live within walking distance of the places I ran away from. Less than a minute’s walk from my current house, just around the corner, a British soldier was shot dead six feet in front of me. His face entered my dreams – year after year after year, even though I’m fairly certain I would not have seen it with my own eyes. I was six years old. I was coming home from school with my mum, baby brother five days shy of turning four, and the wee boy who lived across the street from us on our housing estate. The whole thing happened quicker than the blink of an eye. We were back home in our own kitchen drinking strong, sugary tea before I could even try to find the source of all the noise. I dreamed of him for decades, that lost soldier. I saw his face in the most troubled of nights. Who would have thought the murder of an armed stranger could wound as deeply as that of a friend? I haven’t seen the soldier’s face even once this year. I carried the memory of him as I swam the length of the cove at Inch Island a wee while back, and as I pushed against the waves I knew that I was letting go – of his face, and of so much else that came before him, and after – and I wondered what had got me to this point. I hope that others who have known such loss have got there too, to a still, gentle point, and that they feel hope again, that they look to the sky and see a way through.

  Leaving Ireland is a story that was written for us many moons back, long before we were born. This story of feeling displaced, disjointed – lost – is the story so many other people from my home share. We are a people who mostly live in lands not our own, caught in the in-between places, never quite fully landed on any shore. I played my part in this shared story from a very young age. I am still playing my part, three years after I returned to Irish shores. We have never been able to stay. We have been forced away, by poverty and violence, by loss and by lack. Ireland has been sending her people elsewhere for centuries. Canada, America, Australia, the UK, Europe and almost every spot on this earth have taken these people in, have held them close, have tried to keep them safe, have tried to stop their emigrant tears from flooding back to the body of water they know the best.

  Most of my limited free time in Scotland was spent exploring the islands of the west of my adopted homeland. I returned again and again to the Isle of Mull, gravitating to the north-west of that wild island. I stayed at Treshnish, just around the bay from Calgary in a safe yet dramatic nook of wilderness. The view, on a day free of the hauntingly beautiful haar – a sea fog that creeps in from the furthermost reaches of the Atlantic – takes in the eerily remarkable Treshnish Isles. When night falls in that place, the world around you is so black and still that it is as if the world is holding her breath, waiting for the silence to seep right into your very bones, waiting for tranquillity. I swam in all of the icy-cold bodies of water around me and gathered ancient stones from the inner belly of a waterfall I have only ever found once, unable to find my way back to its clear waters no matter how hard I try. On the third time I visited Treshnish, I realised that when I arrived at the bottom field of the farm, when I saw the Treshnish Isles peek through the thick grey mist, when I heard the sea against the sand at Calgary Bay, I was experiencing the deepest sense of calm and ease I maybe ever had before. That feeling, the one that drew me back to the Isle of Mull again and again, that lingered even days after returning to Edinburgh, was about something deep-rooted, something that was happening underneath my skin. No matter where I went on the Isle of Mull, no matter who came with me – more especially when I was completely on my own – I was being held in place by something I could never qu
ite put my finger on; I was being soothed and nourished by an unnameable thing.

  The thing that was drawing me back, pulling me in close, giving me a sense of hope for the first time in years, was the place. Something happened to me every single time I returned to the farm where I stayed in Treshnish. When I went to bed at night, unlike the sleeplessness and anxiety that met me in other places, I slept the whole night long, like a baby. I slept and I dreamed beautiful, nourishing dreams. In one dream that stays in my memory, I was standing in a wee clearing, not unlike a copse I had found in another part of the island, close to the ferry port. I thought I was completely on my own but I suddenly realised I was being watched, and that the watcher did not have a human form. I was sharing the place, sharing the dream, with an exquisite hummingbird. As it darted about, weaving in and out of view, I became aware of yet another presence in the dream – an old man I had never seen in real life. He told me that the choice was mine. If I left the bird, I could be the one to claim the discovery of it (it was a bird that had not been seen by human eyes before) but then I would not get to really see the bird, and I might never again. I have never experienced that dream again but the vision comes back to me, over and over in this waking world, a kaleidoscopic echo.

  There are places on the Isle of Mull and in other parts of the Celtic world that we still have no means to comprehend; traces of meaning have been left but not in any language we are still rooted enough to decipher. Memorials – made by humans – have been marking thin places on this earth for thousands of years. Ancient people, especially in Ireland and Britain, were forever marking spaces as sacred and worth remembering, as if to say, to whoever might be listening, whenever they might come along: this place is a place to hold close, a place that will hold you close, if you let it.

  I spent most of my free time in Scotland outside and completely alone just like I had in every other place I had settled before. Sometimes a friend and their partner, their children maybe, might walk with me here and there but I mostly spent my days in the wild, howling landscape of Scotland by myself. It is only really this year that I see how much of an accidental gift that ended up being.

  The flat I shared was on the Meadows – a green part of the city in the middle of a handful of affluent areas and student streets. Lots of local residents nurtured gardens in ways that encouraged insects and birds, foxes and other creatures, and so even if I could only manage a walk across the Meadows, on days when my body was weary with the sadness I couldn’t throw off, it was enough to bring a wee glimmer of something light into a day otherwise full of something dark. I walked alone through ancient woodlands – across the Hermitage of Braid, up Blackford Hill and down again, around the picturesque old city, and then up to the very height of an extinct volcano. A volcano visible from my bedroom window which I watched turn every colour under the sun during various moments of alcohol-bathed, suicidal thoughts. A volcano I slipped from during thick January snowfall, after seeing a peregrine falcon for the first time.

  I walked the Pentland Hills, listening out for bells, long hidden in the belly of a loch. I made my way across bodies of water to every island I could manage. On the Isle of Bute I watched a crow gather sticks to build its nest for so long that I missed my ferry back. I remember caring so little about this inability to return to my everyday life. At Rosslyn Chapel I lay beneath an oak and cried salty, unbecoming tears – thinking of all the sorrows from another place, with other oaks, as a nuthatch kept my weepy company for long enough that my face grew dry.

  I began to gather more things from the places I sought refuge in, and to bring them into my rented home. My two large windowsills, looking out across the Meadows on the right-hand side and Arthur’s Seat on the left, filled up with all manner of objects varying in size and texture, depending on where I had found them. I mostly found those things on stretches of sand alongside the sea: shards and fragments, smithereens and bits and bobs, parts and portions of the coastline that was keeping me safe back then. Stones and pebbles, feathers and sea-glass, bones and sticks brought back with me, from one place, to lie in another: why? Were they bringers of comfort and constancy, these hallowed, found things? Even after being spat out – dislodged from wherever they had once been, left to lie in the dark and cold – even after weathering storm after storm, there was still a place for them. There was a place for them in my home, in my life and in my day, and even back then I knew that meant something, even if I didn’t know what. Did they make me feel a wee bit more embedded – in place, in a life I was struggling with every day, in my own body, that vessel that was somehow still dragging me through? Like those pieces, those measures of time and place – of memory – I was still there, too. I was still visible. I was still holding on.

  I was hearing the call of the sea more forcefully than ever before, and I obeyed its pleas to draw close. All along the coastline of Scotland, right down to the border it shares with England – and across it, I threw my thin, tired body into the waves. I swam beneath cliffs of the sea and birds of the same. I swam in grey, churning waves, and in water so calm it lay on the surface as if it were a limestone lough. I swam in the sea that bordered islands, the sea that lay far from any dwelling, the sea where there were so many other people around that I blended into the background like a grain of sand. I travelled over it in boats and ferries, too, and watched creatures of the sky I had only before seen in books. I camped on dunes, and in trees and in places that haunted my sleep. The Farne Islands, Hadrian’s Wall, the Hebrides, Dorset, Kent, the west coast of Scotland, and more and more and more. I ran and ran and ran; I ran to places that would hold me, like a thing worth being held.

  I started to feel a little better, finally. I felt that if I managed to keep going as I was, I would – I could – make it through. Maybe it was the sheer fact of growing older, of realising that you simply cannot move against the river, no matter how much you would like to alter its flow. Perhaps it was the fact that I was learning acceptance – not of my own self, yet, that would take many more years – rather, of the fact that sometimes things just are unfair. Sometimes life is hard for some people, most, if not all of the time. Maybe it had a bit to do with the weather in Scotland. The longer I stayed there, the more I realised that there simply was no point in making solid plans. Trips to islands could be cancelled by spring snowfall, camping plans scuppered by heavy downpour in the height of summer; entire festivals – months in the planning – could be called off because the weather was not on your side. Maybe I was slowly, unconsciously, learning to live in the unseen, uncontrollable flow. All I know is that, looking back, the anger inside had started to feel less vast and volcanic and much more like a small, fluttering bird that fitted perfectly inside my clenched, shaking fist.

  I had finally got myself through the worst of it, I felt sure. But the stories that we tell ourselves are often the most untrue. In truth, the longer I lived away from Ireland the more I knew I needed to find my way back. I was, even though I thought I was getting better, becoming less and less able to cope with ordinary life, and I knew, if I am honest, that I really needed help. I needed to let go of the things I had been carrying – heavy, heavy things. There were thoughts churning around inside my head that I knew no one really deserved to have to contend with. I needed to reclaim the words. I needed to break the silence. I needed to go back across all of those borders of the past and displace them one by one, to undo the fear, to write that new language. I needed to befriend that coal-black crow I had met decades before. In short, I needed to resurface and return to reclaim my homeland and my memories for my own.

  One Friday evening, five years into living in Edinburgh, a couple of hours after I had arrived home from work, my flatmate returned to the flat we shared together and found me shaken and weeping uncontrollably, holding my mobile, my bike shoved against the wall in the dark, damp stairwell of our building. She put her coat around me to try to stop me from shivering, and helped me upstairs. I was in too much of a state to talk so she helped me t
o bed, and I know that she stayed with me until I fell asleep. For many weeks – in different ways, and with different tones – she tried to get me to talk to her about what had happened on that day. She wanted to know what I had heard in whatever call or text she thought must have tipped me over the edge. She wanted to know what bad news I’d received, what had worried me, who had upset me so much. It was such a hard and awkward thing to have to tell her, a friend I love and trust – over and over – that I had absolutely no idea. That I had no clue at all what it was that had brought those tears on, or what – or who – they were for.

  I know that it was on that day I received the text message that told me Seamus Heaney, my favourite writer, had died. I do also know that it was only a fortnight after my grandfather had died, too. I know that that particular summer felt like another period of vast, unsettling loss. I know that the more time marched on in my life, the more I felt alone and increasingly unwilling – unable – to take any more. Something important had gone from inside me, I felt sure of that; something vital had been lost along the way. Maybe not on that afternoon in that Edinburgh tenement building, maybe not on the day my bedroom filled with smoke, maybe not on any one day in particular but I felt as if the thing that I had lost was something that, if I wanted to keep living, I needed to get back. Suddenly, the banks were broken and nothing, nothing whatsoever, could hold the river back.

  I cried and cried, I wept like a baby, uncontrollably, without having any clue what part of it all the tears were even for. I wept for days. I cried so much that I had to phone in sick for the very first time in my working life – not because of flu, or a broken wrist, but because of grief. When my boss asked me who had died I was left unable to really find the words. I wished, I wished so very hard then, that I could find the way to start. I wished that I could find a way to start to put the grief into order, to pinpoint the start line, to choose the part where it would end. I was crying for the years of unwanted transience. I was crying for my own unbroken silence. I was crying for lost things, for things not yet lost but that I felt sure were not going to stay for much longer. I was crying for me, for so many others; I was crying for the past – for things and places – for memories, and for things that were never going to be.