There's always this distinct taste in the back of my throat when on a flight and I only notice it after so many hours. A brew summed from airport coffee-stained teeth, dry cheeks, unwashed teeth, and a lasting note of home stuck on the back of my tongue, strong and overpowering as if to remind me of where I came from– it makes me restless and hungry. I'm served a meal of steamed veggies, and overcooked chicken with a packaged dessert– the three courses advertised as above the clouds, but it’s sure as hell nowhere near God. It’s a reminder to regret our decisions before we make them. 

Never mind. Soon I’ll be washing it all down with a daiquiri at the airport bar, forgetting everything that got me there– now it’s a game of cat and mouse with primal impulses and years of refined patience to guide me out. I chew on my breath mint and get some of my tongue with it, from nervousness, I hate flying. I try to block out the obnoxious couple sitting beside me, all giddy like kids at Disney, but they’re quite literally breathing on top of me. It’s a ritual of blending into the miscellany and shooting menthol into my nostrils while staring intently at my shoes and my luggage between my knees. It’s a balancing act I’ve sadly accustomed myself to. I long exhale unashamed and listen to my music with an ill-willing rumbling of air surrounding it. 

We share oxygen like a hookah and the taste is that of a tongue depressor from the doctor. I'm sure they’re all inoculated, but I couldn't be more certain that I’ve contracted something. 

As the hours tick, I find that up here we can never fall deep enough to rest, which seems appropriate, I can never tell if I'm sleeping, it’s more closely a looping hypnagogic dream where I’ve welcomed all of this company to come and join me. So I daydream instead, fighting hunger and nausea beneath a canopy where I'm comfortable to hide behind until the captain comes on the telecom to alert us of the weather conditions and time of day.

We hit the runway and I sigh audibly. The aisle opens and quickly I’ve forgotten everything and scurry to gather my things, dodging the people parading to get ahead of me and into that tube of slow walking and pent up conversations. 

I lope out with stains under my arms and my hair flat and matted under and around my hat. 

I find a fine seat at the bar and cool my fever until I can hear myself talk. 

The bartender, recognizing our desperation, he acts as a doctor, with syrup at our hands before we can thank him.

“The inn is just a couple of miles east.” 

I can feel myself reorienting and a weight deep in my stomach lifting and finding another poor man passing by heading to his gate. I tip the brim of my hat towards him, sorry, man, but its all in the system. 

We drink and aren't quite ready to talk. I can't wait to get out of this place. 

“I’m ready if you are?”

At her queue, we leave.

It’s always brutal. My body wants to kill me and my mind is wondering where the hell we are. Neither piece of me wants to sleep, so my mind unravels until the source of a single thought is untraceable, until the only thing I can do is go on gathering the pieces like a bird picking breadcrumbs until my starved stomach is full. 

I write this in the barroom of Herlihy's pub south of Galway and west of Limerick. A skeleton of twentieth-century Ireland, now repurposed into a quaint inn accommodating me and my girlfriend. Still sporting its unrelenting charm of velvet barstools, antique gas lamps, distressed furnishings, rustic and also velvet upholstery, and a presently amusing no-smoking sign. 

It stands sturdy with its neatly etched place in history, small, yet resilient to the sweeping scythe of time and memory; carrying a bravado and earnestness that I envy, and a fine selection of old spirits and classic beers sitting on display behind the cedar bar collecting dust and fewer whispers by the minute. It's tempting, but even I wouldn't drink it. 

It's hard to say what happened to this place. I ruminate over a warm Franciscan Well in an old fancy rock glass probably unsanitized next to an inactive fireplace and try not to be convinced that this place is haunted. 

Where is everybody? The longer I sit in the quiet ambiance of country traffic, sporadic yet persistent, I swear, I can still hear the barmaid filling pints and pitchers. 

I wouldn't consider myself a believer of the paranormal, but when the lights flicker and the array of newspapers on the walls disappear like time signatures… it's unsettling. 

Mirrors fill every gap between the pictures that otherwise might have shown wallpaper, and a massive clock on the wall dead at a quarter to three makes this evening like an illusion, slicing up a moment in time for the long-forgotten parishioners, a refuge for the tired workers, and a reprise filled to the brim with clattering glasses and husky laughter. The longer I sit, the more claustrophobic I get by the emptiness. 

To counter my inhibitions, I polish my drink, close my eyes, and take in once more the sounds, the musky smells, and potent tastes of what likely were the good times. 

And before I know it. I’ve finally drifted.  

My eyes spin pretty visions of the countryside flashing by like cherries in a slot machine. Baring heaps of grass, swaying trees, and wet cobblestone overgrowth pass by like quick youth. Vegetative and reflective rivers like to tell me that it's acid, so I believe them–  if I didn't, then this shade of green exists impossibly if not purely fantasy, and that's frightening, so I accept I am in a place where acid sweats from the mountains and cures everything and everybody.

It’s difficult to process the beauty, the enormity, the crystal air, and the size of me nestled comfortably in insignificance between mountain peaks and distant valleys. The harmony of every living thing from the mountains to the sheep in the pasture wrapping me in awe-striking, all-consuming, unlimited solidarity, and swallowing me like an ant and everything else that carries a human resemblance with it. 

I stare into the Twelve Bens like Columbus and try to light a cigarette, but the winds here are a harsh buffer and disagreeable to my proclivity for an oral fixation in the face of Mother Earth.

The beautiful woman standing next to me covered the glow with her fingers, and, sitting grateful and immovable, I watched out over the walking paths people like me made to ring around the base like stretch marks, and I wondered how flat they once were. We stand at the bottom looking up like patients at the altar with pruned skin, or peasants to their sire. Drenched and water-logged with coffees warming our hands and stomachs, hers white and mine chocolate–we chat and strategize about our in– just where and how to slip into the crowd unnoticed, swiftly between an always repeating index of fraternizing and laughing students and visitors never ceasing, always looking, always waiting for our attempt at an entrance. I look around and this place seems more like an LA retreat than a forgotten paradise like we expected: The dilapidated monuments, castles, and abbeys with mud floors, eroding doors, and whatever was left of the rubble and ashlar, pubs with a wet wood odor, pastures only many acres from another, and cloud breaking cathedrals ringing so that it vibrates the street floor. This is different. It’s manicured and paved, God imagined for my arrival, how am I supposed to act, I’m flustered and underdressed, I didn't expect so many visitors, it's so carelessly populated, so heavy that the clouds and thick rain couldn't cover it, I feel smothered. 

I expected a vague road that led to a mountain forgotten, and I feel ashamed that I actually felt relieved by this outcome.  

The rain cleared, but it's never gone for long. The wind only strengthened as we started up the trail with about a hundred rather than hundreds of other farers, and we joined alongside them with ease, in search of something that means probably nothing, just like one of them. 

We found our opening, and it's a place in the rain with enough room to dance in, unthinking because all those around us either see us and pass by and say nothing or see something undeniably pretty, courageous, and faithful without asking. 

Well behind the grave we move feathery allowing the wind under our feet as we do not possess our wings, the determinant storm waves reap and chug like Sisyphus in the middle part, neither beginning nor ending, swirling around the base like vapor in a flask, and in a blink I found myself upon a mountain shaft where the tango ends without a step.  

It was beautiful, yes, spiritual, and the panacea I needed, as close as I've ever gotten to sex without a woman. Not quite to the peak yet, but high enough for the clouds to thin and resemble waves and for the mountain tops to resemble sea stacks. The rolling hills reached deeper grays until they were black. The true ocean became an unclear extension of the true sky until the feeling resembled much too close to emptiness, the thing that made me so curious to come here in the first place. With mouths closed and eyes exposed, I fell deep into a hole where I’ve made myself quite known, silently picking at my bones and scratching at a hope I thought I saw in a movie a while ago, like the flagpole at the peak of the mountain, not the flag itself, but the rod burrowed in soil, steadfast, relentless, and still determined, but faith escaping as it thins with the oxygen.

I wasn't disappointed, and I wasn't angry, but I was surprised by the place I decided my savior. Stained with sweat, I stared as passionately as the creator would until I could finally feel my nose clear and my chest simmer. The more I allowed myself to be in it the more I noticed that this could just as easily be described as the word missing from my vocabulary… it was that emptiness you yearn for when life is a scornful bitch, when the meaning of nothing is meaningless, and when everything falling apart creates a pretty image. 

The world seemed superfluous, and the big words didn't capture it. The more I ingested, the faster it escaped me and the poetry turned to careless adjectives. 

Those words rang like a gavel in court. “You can't have it.”

Her shoulders turned away from me. I almost died when I heard it, but the rain had come again, and this time the winds climbing the mountain had built momentum, and we can't compete with giants.

I turned to look back once more, up to heaven, and to the one thing that just might have saved me, and watched as it slipped right through my dripping fingertips. I snapped a photo to remember it and then immediately forgot to ever look at it.

That's alright, I wasn't too attached yet. Maybe I'm not meant for the mountains–they aren't much for people watching or drink nursing–they're nice to look at, exciting and momentous, but maybe prettier in the background– I convinced myself of that. 

On the way down the hill, I continued to apply sympathy and let myself be arrogant, my poor self-important soul. The more I catered the more I accepted my role as a human, I'm not a piece of this image, not an instrument in some grand parade, I'm not a mountain goat, I'm not a wanderer damned to be a soul, I'm outside the composition. 

Zarathustra spoke, and we asked to be the last men. Sadly, we wouldn't like it so easy.  

It became easier as the Bens grew smaller and swiftly covered themselves with clouds abashedly. Maybe I already found my peace. Maybe my Elysium is people pressed and sticky where my elbows rest, nearly touching the man beside me spilling his feelings onto the bar floor… some place at the bottom where it’s flat and popular. It’s easier to shake the feelings down there. 

With a pint in front of me, brown and snow-capped, there's no need for rainy kingdoms in the mountaintops, it’s too quiet anyway, too sinister, circumcising, and the fog rolls like a stealthy, cruel executor with a lead arm until my jaw is slacking. Why chase what I only describe as death? I like it down here I think… even with the maybes and extra convincing. It's pure and cozy, and they don't care to respect me, and it’s dry. My face is flushed and not ashen, my legs are comfortably crossed and not quivering. It's like church, and with the singing. A perfect place for regret and comradery over a pitcher and fish. Lit like a darkroom, disruptive and welcoming like any government, and it rumbles with deep voices and feet rushing to the nearest toilet. I’m seen yet completely unnoticed. This, this is paradise, just as god intended it. 

In a blitz of fog and days inheriting fugue states–I find myself at Sean's bar, the oldest in Ireland, possibly ever. A God-facing agnostic ordering pints like peanuts, sitting in this chamber of reflections just like a local vagrant. Mulling over our pasts and futures, haves and have-nots, never quite landing on the present. Mother, I’d like you to know that I think I’ve made it. The place I’d always dreamed of… smoke, smut on the walls, alcohol, and all the things we shouldn't speak of. 

I sound like a folk singer reminiscing, but I’m not wrong in any sense that I can digest. I am exactly where I'm meant to be, barely aware, and depositing just the right amount of despair into the air like a portage fee. 

The atmosphere is that of a grave that I've found rather accommodating. There are more honest people here than anywhere else I’d ever been. At first, it feels very strange, alarmingly coarse and unrefined, uncomfortably human, and offputting, but as I sip and sink into my seat, it becomes undeniable that this is the truest form I’ve ever seen, the pure, unaltered, and uncaptured thing that in many of our lives gets thousands of hours of sleep. It infects me and I slump euphorically wanting to evacuate all my feelings onto the man sitting next to me asking where I'm from because it is obvious, but I’m busy ascending into rafters that will inevitably puncture my rising eternal tether with splinters, so instead I nod and turn my chair to deliver the message. 

There's a bravado here that can shrink a real wool sweater like a dryer, so we all wait patiently, held up in a place of varied drinking paces and a smoke in hand, unapologetic, and thinking of the man or woman in front of them. Evaluating the pros list and discarding what could be misinterpreted.  

The wait here is long, but it's a courageous one, unconcerned of the future, and as mature as the time they’ve gathered, it’s all part of the pleasure, the freedom in leisure. It’s what I imagined for so long, a waiting room before heaven’s door that could welcome a man like me. A line in the river Moy every so often pulling with time, a fish or wind, it wouldn't make a difference because it's the perfect place to recede in. 

It’s a weird feeling wandering off so far that you’ve arrived and you forgot to leave your footprints. I wonder who else here relates…  

Sipping at the pace the clock turned, I slipped all too easily back into my usual state of being. Meddling in other people's affairs, judging myself based on their posture and company, picking my nails, touching my face too often, running their lives through a machine that only a brain could operate, piecing it together carelessly, watching the door like a man with anxieties he can't admit, and ordering drinks out of courtesy until I can finally drunkenly relent. 

Am I the only one thinking this? I turn to view the room as a panoramic and see stains on the tables and cushions harshly reticent. 

Imposter! Someone yelled from the alley, but nobody heard me. The lights above the bar flicker, barrelling through my photoreceptors like cocaine, stares hurdling toward me then evaporating into a smoke cloud only to reveal a patron blinking expectantly, windows building so much water it obscures the street and capturing me in its walls molding, faces, beautiful faces, voices trailing, and time succumbing to its circumstance. 

I fall deaf and silent. Oddly aroused and impotent, at the whim of the sacrament. 

I order one more out of courtesy. Looking blindly once again–It’s the accurate representation of order, a nature so bogged down it took its grief in the parlor. Evolving from our friend the devil, our partner, into the people we admire. We’ll all end up there, but it's how we get there that matters. A black cloth covers the back doors and sunlight slips through the rafters like rainwater. I watch as it colors the patrons and then my chair, only for the sun to have shifted and the scene to turn stale again, like a blink with and without glasses; come to find out it’s a bar after all, no different from any other. It doesn't need to be an art form; it doesn't need grafters. It’s for the martyr of his choice. It's not poetic, just precarious enough for a man to think it is. 

I watch as bubbles form at the bottom of my cup... it seems thirsty, my heavy eyes batting like buoys in the bar's reflection– I am torn between the same two things always. Judgment and care.

I turn in after a single sip and at the hotel am regretful. I am a vampire tormented by the thousand years or so I've lived. 

Bristles and pine needles stick to the clothes in the bottom of my bag. Guinness lingers in the breaths I take. The feeling of rain is on my clothes even when I'm dry. It wasn't much different from home aside from the mountains and people and cities and towns, but I hate to say goodbye. 

Quiet and dejected, I pack my things nicely, just as I did two weeks ago. 

It went quickly, as it usually does. Warting experiments like renting a van from a fink in Ballyboghil and breaking it down at every intersection and hill only to return it a day later to flashes of memories too new to remember–so they sit in a bottle diluted by brandy. 

In glimpses, if I try hard enough I can pull some images up… Cliffs so precipitous that if you fell, it’d be in a movie script, hills pulling in fog like a shall over a body curved like a Mary Magdeline, land so hydrated it forgot to stop growing, grasses almost phosphorescent from its gluttony, greedily soaking up the gold like rain droplets, churches that splay into the earth like roots and reach high into the sky, bars reeking of joy and sodden wood afterward, and men and woman walking with their hips and shoulders and not their knees.

I fear that I'm leaving something behind because I must be, but the taxicab is waiting, so if nothing else, if I forget something, at least a piece can stay, even if in a dirty lost and found bin only to find its way into somebody else's closet or a garbage can. 

We always leave so quickly. It’s cruel, it’s bittersweet. 

I don't know how to feel about it and I don't know that it’s too important that I know. 

The lady from TSA smiles and I grab my things and smile back. I'm tired and eager to get this part over with–I hate airports. It's a march we all get on with if we’re interested, I think. Every memory we create we do so with an ending so that we can come back and enjoy it later, so let's get on with it. 

My knees ache, and I tremble and touch my face again. 

Normally, this is the part where I become a kid and forget my social expectations and run with my imagination. In those horrible airplane chairs previously mentioned, I try to vanish and I do so with little focus. 

A man in a worn ball cap stands on the dock, and without so much as a wave of acknowledgment, I board his ship, and we set off without another gesture or word spoken. It’s a charter that takes foreigners out into the Celtic Sea with a man who knows something about fishing. The silence is peaceful and the waves crashing, birds chirping, and the boat creaking brings me right to the center of my stomach where my heart beats and my childhood grieves. We stare out into an expanse that reflects the stars at night and wait until we must say something. 

“Where are you from?”

“America.”

The time drew on and eventually; we became interesting enough. 

We talk about old fishing tales and shipwrecks and Latin music. 

It’s warm but not too unlike Ireland. The waves travel a thousand miles just to be disrupted by our boat and the seabirds circle every so often, checking on our status. I haven't seen a rod tip or felt the floor rumble from excitement since the one-off fish at the beginning, a three to four-pound haddock.

The smell of ragworm, blood, and other baits stain my clothes and nostrils. 

I’m awkwardly pacing, telling him of Dublin, Athlone, Killarney, Limerick, Galway, Cork… all places I’d gladly call home, testing him and making a jealous local. 

He tells me of Montreal, Dubrovnik, Buenos Aires, Elche, Spetses… all places he’d rather be. I find him amusing. He rambles like a sailor as I get to know him. 

“The drinks, the fishing, the woman and dishes, the drinks are something though paired with a fine woman, but those fish are big and the buildings are something mysterious, those buildings I believe were built in the seventh century, and the islands that you can boat to, and the woman and fish are something, have you be–Kala Kala Kala,” he interrupts himself and jolts to set the hook for me.

It reminds me of my grandfather and then I remember that we all go home eventually, peeling our fingernails off, frying our vocal cords. We go nevertheless. 

I open my eyes to daylight and turbulence, the woman in front of me complaining about the food that I missed.

I turn to the woman I travel with, beautifully drifted, illuminated by the sunrise resting against the window with the shade half drawn, glowing in the most unapologetic light, glowing like the mosaics we saw in the cathedrals, and can't help but remember something and smile. 

It was beautiful, and only a few hours to go before it ends. The plane tilts and the people brace and then return to place. I look around and the flight attendants are walking about collecting garbage. I think I'll fall back asleep before I know it. 

It was good. It always is. Really.

Next time I’ll find a charter with a fisherman who likes women and doesn't remember my name. It's always next time, and frankly, that's the best thing about it. 

I never thought I’d see such a thing. I used to dream of this as a kid. Now I'm dreaming again, but it's different.

We always dream. I wish I could notice it more often.