Things are being shaken up, in ways I can’t talk about yet, and it’s terrifying the shit out of me. The greatest thing recently is that it is summer in Dublin and if you only ever see Dublin in this light, there’s really no leaving this place. I’ve been in the tropics, so greenery shouldn’t dazzle me so much. But there’s a silent, hopeful desperation in the way the flora here just seem to go crazy when they get a bit of constant sunlight. I’m not quite sure what emerald green means, but the green here in the summer is just this playful, extravagant, rambunctious kind of green. There was this row of trees beside the tram stop that we could swear was not as thick as they were when we last saw them. This is the time in an immigrant’s life when one notices a tree’s state of aliveness, apparently.

Several fears have reappeared recently, and a lot of it has to do with capitalistic values, and how people are trained to think that employment is the safest way to achieve some semblance of freedom to do what one wants. Forced now to face the next few decades of my life, I have to think, don’t I have enough to sustain me for the very simple things I want to be doing the rest of my days? Look, all I want, right now, barring some force majeure like a sudden relationship or a pet, is to read a lot, write a lot, learn the guitar, the drums, volunteer, talk to people, learn some martial art or kickboxing, and eat healthy. What big, unnameable dream am I still saving up for?

I don’t know, man, why should I keep thinking about money? Why is life like that? Why can’t I make a decision not bound to my purchasing power, or whether or not I’ll have more or less of it, why can’t we all just be doing fun things we were born to do or have forgotten to? Why should we be forced to shove these “hobbies” into the side lines of our lives? Why do some people get to throw their lives into their art? Why do some people wholly enjoy their professions? Why am I good at a lot of things (and like doing said things), but care a lot more deeply about things that don’t make me money?

What does being a writer mean? I don’t think this is it, not yet. I am close, but there’s a deep maw I keep looking at that I can’t seem to cross. It’s when I can tell you exactly what’s happening, or exactly what I’m feeling and so I allude to it, in words like fear or liminal spaces or hopeful desperation. Or I can describe it in the way it makes me feel: there is a rope, see, and I am floating in a bottomless, horizonless sea and my hands are ragged from holding onto the rope. I’m bleeding, I’ve been bleeding for years. The rope had worn out, I’m holding onto one of the thin braids of said rope and I’ve wrapped it around my pulse so I can stop listening to it pound in anger at what I’m doing. I can’t let go, not yet, there are things I love on land and things that love me. But beyond, that wild, lawless blue, might kill me, but it might also show me another kind of life. There is no shame in staying, there are thousands of us here on shore, and we have good lives here. But every now and then, I’d see someone out there, on a surfboard or something, or a poorly cobbled up raft, raving like madmen who’d been touched by gods. We laugh at them a little bit, we all do. But that night, we all cry.