Dingle Bay

The relationship had been over a while but we had not broken up.

We were still together.

Alone together.

He’d call and I’d pick up.

Inside I was broken up.

Eventually I made the break.

It was a bell-clean see-for-miles expanse of summer weekend morning that picked me up and swept me across miles of peninsula - on the motorbike - riding out from Limerick passed contractors and tractors and through mountain passes where cloud shadows scurried across loud land masses - dancing with me - escorting me down onto the long yellow beaches of Strand that led west out to Dingle.

That bevelled corner of Ireland pulling me to her like magnets on a pin cushion.

I checked in and unpacked. My room had a long balcony floored with dark planks of treated wood and a glass rail affording views of New World potential even as I lay in bed. Yellow and blue and white bars. Sand sea sky. And the pillow in my eye.

Three thousand one hundred miles in a south westerly swipe gives me Liberty, looking right back at me all promissory and statuesque. Extending her arms out to these coves and farms.

Straight across for Nova Scotia. New Scotland. A reactionary relic of the Highland Clearances.

Celtic shadows.

And I very nearly missed her.

She grew from a dot to a walking woman. Beaming. Coming straight at me. All purposeful and blurry as the sea spray sheen and taking over my bell-clean see-for-miles vista.

Giving me the big thirty-twos. Out-shining even the Eastern fires of a new day. And me at a happy loss. My mouth curled at the smile in her eyes.

Later I ran at pace out across the bay and up two hills. Cresting, I arrived into a sandcastle breeze at the old town where buildings came out of a cold stone quarry that still glistened like the ink wet signature of founding fathers.

Gulls kept darting.

A town of iron oxide red and violet manganese. A mineral town dolled up blue and yellow and pink and green in the Irish way. Childhood story houses. Gift-wrapped in band board, corners and frieze that flutter on the ocean breeze.

With shrines in every window, even the bank. And nothing open on the Sabbath but the towering basilica. Its Roman magnificence shimmered and settled in loco parentis.

An Atlantic psyche washed over me.

I’d gotten away.

And when I went home I never went back. Just forward through a sequence of nows. He’d call but I was always newly engaged and all the more fortified for it. Nestled in the silky steel resolve of closure.

Everything rounded in its rightful frame of reference like the holiday postcard that falls out of the mail, seven days old and machine frank-stamped in the corner with the six digits of that red letter day.

Wish you were here.

From Dingle Bay.

..

gK