It is the second day of classes resuming, and much of the miserable doubt and worry of the empty time during the faculty strike is lifting surely as our professors reassure us, cut out small pieces of the courses, and focus the first week largely on review. Every gesture shows understanding and mediation for the difficulties of resuming after such a long interruption. My intermediate accounting professor, having read an email I sent him telling him that my morale and confidence had been very low trying to navigate his online course with the textbook alone, thanked me for my refreshingly candid words and invited me to sit in on classes in person. It is all a soothing balm to my troubles.
Sadly, the professors themselves may have had little relief from theirs. The strike's disputes were not resolved, and there is some worry that this might all repeat in another four years, after the new contracts expire again, and they must meet to agree on terms of renewal again.
My spirits are higher, and I look forward to moving into a very nice house directly across from the campus, the nicest I have lived in... Looking back, and looking back further, it may be fair to say that it is the nicest looking and most modernly appointed house I have ever lived in in Canada. My parents' houses were a welcome home to me, but simple. My new room will have an ensuite bathroom, and the kitchen has a central island and two big fridges to accomodate I think five female tenants.
Through all that, though, my thoughts remain restlessly and inexorably drawn back to Eoin and distant Éire. It feels to me as though the memory of him stands always behind my shoulder. When my mind wanders, it wanders to dreams of return, and meeting with him again, with much tear and hope and fear, desperate to know what his answer will be...
It has been three weeks since our last goodbye, and since the law of silence has been set between us. These last few days have tested my will to adhere to that law. I felt that I was doing fair well, for a little while, at looking to my own life alone, although it was a miserably empty stretch of life indeed with neither love nor work nor school to sustain me. I took up to make a game to run for friends, which I have nicknamed the SCDP game, a Super Casual Drop-in Pick-up game of Pathfinder such that I can run it and invite people to play it without a set group or a set schedule. I finally finished writing all the stats for available player characters to the website I'll be using just a day or two before the return to classes, and I have not played it yet. I am not certain I will even get the chance, but the project was something with which I might hope to enjoy the social attentions of friends.
At some point, perhaps a week ago... I lost track of the empty days for a while, so I am not sure... I was re-watching a bunch of video reviews, and one of them ambushed me with the high, haunting and familiar voice of Loreena McKennitt and the sweet melancholy violins of Irish tradition behind her. I knew the song, The Old Ways, I had heard it and loved it and felt magnificently drawn by it from my early youth. It hit me like a hammer blow, and broke open yet again any thought that I could deny my desperate want to go back there, back over the bounding waves to the distant shore of a land I have always loved, in music and legend, and the man I loved who lives there.
Eoin could not promise me any answer. It has been three weeks since I last heard his voice, and now at last doubt begins to creep back, and I begin to worry and wonder. We knew each other scant three months, and it is already past that long ago. Even if I do make my way back to that great isle, and see his face again... If it is a year, if it is several, how could I expect him to look on me as other than a sad and obsessed woman whose storms and ferocity he may have been glad to be rid of?
But. I know with enough confidence to say that I know... whatever may happen in the coming years, at the time three weeks ago when he bid me leave him be, Eoin was yet undecided. If he had in his mind any certain answer, I know with confidence he is too good and honest a man not to have given it. When last he spoke to me, there was love enough in him, and perhaps also longing of his own, that he was not set against seeing me again someday. He was not sure what he would feel. If it had been more honest to tell me he would rather never see me again, for all the pain it may have cost him, I am sure he would have said it anyway.
So. What his answer will be, I cannot know until I have heard it from his own lips. I cannot hear it until I go there, for until I am there, he cannot know himself whether he will be willing to bring me close again. As I walk out from my house into the cold, bare young-winter, gazing up at the steely light where the sun shines through the thinnest parts of the grey clouds, returning at long last to my studies with the weight of my work things at my back... As I walk the cold and formal halls of my college, which now seems too large and too impersonal... I know that Eoin is not the only or the first man for whom I have felt this utter determination, the deep and aching sense that I would be willing to do nearly anything to see him smile at me again. I feel rather as though I will set my determination to heading there, but do it all with a sheepish apology to him, and hope he will not feel my devotion cheap because he has not been the only one to inspire it.
I know my will, though mighty, is shifting. I know I may look back on these words with embarrassment and a shake of the head that I was so caught up in love and grief. Still, from here, as of now, I am determined by all the madness of my heart and a relentless longing in my bones to go back to Ireland, to distant Éire, and find out what his answer will be. I know that to do any different while I feel as I do would be to rend apart my nature, to bury my desire and smash my compass, and live as someone I am not. It would not be a story worth telling. Better to go, full of all my courage and wild strength, and profess myself to him as simply and as gently as I can, even if the answer I find is to be turned away as a nuisance, and go back to the rocky path of lonesomeness, to stalk on like a restless ghost and seek on anew for someone who will at long last stand and travel by my side.
So every day, whether I resist it or not, my thoughts wander back again when I am not looking, and I imagine living in love with him again; or I imagine troubles there might be in trying to get in touch after I land; or I imagine cautiously studying his eyes when he first sees me again, asking how things have changed, what shape his life has taken, and trying to learn whether there is room for me in it; Or of being greeted with a kiss and falling into desperate tears, begging to know if he meant by it that I would be given a chance to stay this time. Sometimes I imagine talking to a border guard of my intent to immigrate. Sometimes I imagine talking to a representative of an accounting firm for which I intend to work in Ireland in an interview about my reasons for coming. But it is always something, and it always pulls my view East, across the ocean, with the call of the bounding sea.
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