Then I sit there, running the heat to try and thaw my feet after Lucy’s flat, and watch the people going past. They make me edgy. Dozens and dozens of people, they just keep coming, and every single one of their heads is crammed with stories they believe and stories they want to believe and stories someone else has made them believe, and every story is battering against the thin walls of the person’s skull, drilling and gnawing for its chance to escape and attack someone.
That long sigh again, above us. This time I saw it, moving through the branches. Like the trees were listening; like they would’ve been sad about us, sad for us, only they’d heard it all so many thousand times before.
If you care more about them than they do about you, they hate you for it.
I’ve only got a handful of memories, and I don’t want them wearing away, textures rubbing smooth, colors fading from overexposure. When I take them out, once in a blue moon, I need them bright enough to catch my breath and sharp enough to cut.
If I had to get there without friends, I could do it. Had been doing it. I’d never met anyone who brought me somewhere I wanted to stay, looked at me and saw someone I wanted to be for good; anyone who was worth giving up the more I wanted down the line.
The joy of the new, hip, happening, double-espresso Dublin is that you can blame any strange mood on coffee deprivation. This never worked in the era of tea, at least not at the same level of street cred.
Don’t fool yourself: we all have a cruel streak. We keep it under lock and key either because we’re afraid of getting punished or because we believe this will somehow make a difference, make the world a better place.
Today Henry would be running a banana republic with serious border issues and a dodgy nuclear-weapons program.
Ma and Mrs. Daly were on speaking terms, most of the time; women prefer to hate each other at close range, where you get more bang for your buck.
Everyone knows a wife and kids tie you down. What people miss sometimes is that mates, the proper kind, they do the same just as hard. Mates mean you’ve settled, made your bargain: this, wherever you are together, this is as far as you’re going, ever. This is your stop; this is where you get off.
The thing about old neighborhoods: people still mind each other’s business.
If you think you’re a success, you will be a success; if you think you deserve nothing but crap, you’ll get nothing but crap. Your inner reality shapes your outer one, every day of your life.
They are forever, a brief and mortal forever, a forever that will grow into their bones and be held inside them after it ends, intact, indestructible.
But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver.
I watched her on the stand in that unfamiliar suit and thought of the soft hairs at the back of her neck, warm and smelling of the sun, and it seemed an impossible thing to me, it seemed the vastest and saddest miracle of my life: I touched her hair, once.
I should’ve known the eyes. Wide, bright blue, and something about the delicate arc of the lids: a cat’s slant, a pale jeweled girl in an old painting, a secret.
Some part of me believed, unassailably, and wordlessly and perhaps with a flick of justice, that they had sent me away because they were afraid of me. Like some monstrously deformed child who should never have lived beyond infancy, or a conjoined twin whose other half died under the knife, I had- simply by surviving-become a freak of nature.
I know I said that I always choose the anticlimactic over the irrevocable, and yes of course what I meant was that I have always been a coward, but I lied: not always, there was that night, there was that one time.
What I saw transformed with a click like a shaken kaleidoscope. I stopped falling in love with her and started to like her immensely.
Nobody knows you like people you grew up with.