A month on...7/10/2010

The past month has been crazy.

Made a hell of a lot of new friends.
Made mistakes.
Lived.
Lost.

Last Friday night I was crushed...because I was chatting with my aunt and JUST stopped myself in time from asking how Gran was.

Asking that has been part of the flow of conversation for years.

And all of a sudden it was as if the past month never happened...I was right back in the removal home.


If it was just remembering Gran I'd be fine. But anytime a moment like that happens it's everyone hitting at once.
Those who passed away from old age.
And even harder are those who didn't...
Those taken by the Big C.
Those taken by themselves.
Those taken by the road.

A friend of mine from secondary school had a lot in common with me. We weren't close friends. But we could, and did, talk about anything. We were both smart, reserved, into the same kind of games, books, dealt with people in the same manner...
I always felt he was smarter. And more comfortable around people. He seemed to have pretty much all of my strengths. And not many of my weaknesses.
We represented the school at a few competitions, and travelling to and from those we had great banter going...politics, religion, life in general.
And he blew me away in a Music store across from a second hand comic store in Dublin...cos he was AMAZING with the electric guitar.

We did the Leaving Cert. He started in UCC.
I started in Mary I....loss of contact like with anyone else.

A month and a half after our Grads ball I got a phone call to tell me he was dead. Suicide.


I still don't understand.
And I hate not understanding things.

I don't understand why he did it.
I don't understand why I'm still here when he's not.


I don't understand why and it hurts.

And frankly I'm scared that one day I will understand, and that that'll be the time that someone else winds up mourning me and wondering why I'll have done something they don't understand.

It's always darkest before the dawn...and if I hold on tight, and stick with it, I know that dawn will break.


There's a recession.
There's heartbreak.

But there's also joy.

There are a few people on GayCork and around Cork that don't realise the lifts they've given me over the past 6 weeks or so.

Whether it's banter over a bar, a walk and a talk, chatting over how I worked two villages over from where ya grew up, how we share a first name, or a surname, same taste in tv or comics or....drinks, or finding out that someone from my home village is working in one of my haunts and having the craic with her...and card tricks...
...each of those things has given me a lift when I've needed it. Sometimes I don't even know when I need a lift 'til after I've gotten one.

So thanks y'all. And I hope that I'm able to give ye a lift sometime when you're down.