When I was a child, we tore down the old part of the house. Outside, with sledgehammers, we smashed the plaster; inside, with crowbars, we pried apart the walls, scattering spiders. The house came apart so easily, and we piled it up and waited for bonfire night, for summer solstice, so that our village fire would be the biggest and the brightest.
In a seaside town, between a hollowed cathedral and a broken castle, I sat at my desk and studied. Underlining, dog-earing, highlighting; seagulls screeching behind the laptop screen, beyond the window. For two seasons, I deconstructed, dissected, disassembled. Academia abstracted everything: death, love, work, home. Academia abstracted me. Until it seemed as though my body had dissolved. Sitting in my cubby of a room by the sea, I read and typed and became less real.
I lost where in the world I was. A bird turned in the sky, and I thought eagle. A feather lay in the sand, and I thought weka. But no, of course it was a buzzard in that northern sky, a curlew feather in the sand; I was in neither of those places.
Then the phone rang with bad news; and again with bad news, independent of the other. A diagnosis; a death. I sat on the kitchen floor and repeated the words I’d heard on the phone, over and over, to learn them; to understand, to fathom, what they meant.
The sea moved forever before me, as I gathered dust in my north-facing room. I wrote the essays, I ticked the boxes, and every night, I checked the doors were locked, the windows closed, the oven off. Pressing palm over candle—to be sure it was out—pressing palm to door to pray it would hold fast against whatever malevolent gravity was beyond it; sealing myself inside.
In the margin between semesters, I went walking. For the first few days, I walked with my partner, who had some time off work. Stumbling into Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, we wandered easily until we found beds, unaware of our luck. In the morning, with our pilgrim passports, and a baguette like a flag at the side of my rucksack, we joined a river of peregrinos on the Camino de Santiago and set off across the Pyrenees. The horses’ bells were ringing. A mole from underfoot surprised us. Newborn foals took their first steps in the dawn mist. We queued, we sprinted, we walked into the evening to find beds; we slept on the floor. We walked together to the fountain of wine, where we filled our water bottles and said goodbye.
I walked on alone. I didn’t know where I would sleep that night; I was prying myself apart, smashing the plaster.
Poppies: fields and fields bursting with them, the bright, soft flowers blushing out of stone walls, gravel roads, old ruins. I walked and held a poppy petal in my palm. I watched a bird of prey sink into a field of poppies and rise over me.
I was told that I needed a purpose; that I was brave; that I was very young to do this alone.
I could feel, sometimes very painfully, how young I was. Like that moment, a few months before, when given the news, over the phone, that a friend had died by suicide. But he’s okay, right?
At the funeral, friends transformed to adults: holding the coffin, holding each other. Shock and grief; the kind relief of gentle laughter. It’s good to see you.
The night before my flight to France, I stayed in the house where he had died, I slept over the room where he’d been found. To support the friends who lived there, to help to heal. But I failed. I woke up screaming, dreaming I was being pulled downward.
As I walked, I imagined his spirit in the mountains in Connemara.
Of the aching cathedrals and the tiny churches, I liked the tiny churches best. In their small dark caves, I felt held and hidden, and there were sometimes candles—real ones—and I would light one, and say a name, a prayer, and try to make it mean something—heal something—before I gathered my rucksack and carried on.
There were days walking alongside mothers, who praised and encouraged me, sharing insights and feelings; fathers, who teased and cheered me, telling silly jokes and stories; parents who spoke Irish to me, walked me to my albergue, paid for my dinner. There was not a day where I was not met, or minded; where I did not match pace with somebody.
Buen Camino.
Each scallop shell—carved into the footpath, scrawled on the wall, outlined in stones—was like the surprise of seeing dolphins, or a shooting star; a butterfly landing on your shoulder; a sign, that no, you are not lost, you may carry on.
Each bed found was a blessing and a kindness. Every time I despaired, or tired, some sweetness came my way: a conversation, a gesture, a gift. The words my mother told me when I was a child, every night before I went to sleep, walked into my mind. The universe is benevolent.
People are only waiting for a chance to be kind. This is so clear when lost and alone and vulnerable; when bandaging one’s foot on the side of a dirt road, or sweaty and sun-stroked and without a bed, or just young and alone and frightened.
When we know where we’re going, when we know the language, when we don’t need help, it’s very easy to forget the kindness surrounding us.
It was a surprising comfort to find that my body ached as my heart. Because I was learning what to do when my body ached. After claiming my bed, after washing myself in the shower, after wringing out my clothes in the sink—socks, underwear, t-shirt—I rested. On the top bunk in the albergue, in the municipal—one bed in four, one bed in one hundred and thirty, I stretched and breathed deeply, I lay down inside my sleeping bag; in the company of snoring strangers, I slept.
I found my feet. Finding rest, food, succour: all thoughtless and embodied and instinctive. Passing the chance of a bed, because feet carry on. Stop. Start. Carry on. I followed my feet.
Every day, my tightening fist was opened: the pilgrims around me, the albergues, the landscape changing. Every moment, I had to leave it all behind. There was only so much I could carry on my back. Through villages, cities, farmland; beside bleak highways, over green hills; I let it all go.
Only once did I feel unsafe. Coming into a city, on a remote path, a group of shadowed men were gathered by their motorcycles watching me approach. My feet turned me around and brought me away; they would not bring me past.
Instead, I walked on the side of the road and into the haunted margins of the city, and arrived after forty kilometers into a hotel where the men who worked there gave me wine and called me loco, because I was young and solo and had walked so far. That night, with a room to myself, I felt the terror and grief of things coming apart.
River met sea, pilgrims pooled into Santiago, and I was adrift and lonely. I drank wine, I wandered. I rested my weary body on the floor of the cathedral as the mass went on. The taxi whizzed me back over my day’s walking. My feet were off the ground. Sun was setting amber behind the plane as I boarded.
A return to academia, to a delayed dissertation: reading, thinking, typing; a summer of sitting, procrastinating, abstracting. Months of stillness, of stagnation, of awful paralysis: watching the word count grow, watching the pigeons circle outside, the seagulls; the scallop shell hanging above my desk; shoulders sinking downwards, gravity dragging. Pressing palm to candle, palm to door. A summer of bad dreams.
For my birthday, I went home, and in my childhood bedroom, ivy had darkened the window, and heart-shaped leaves were prying through the cracks, hanging over the sill. Underneath my bed, my shoes were soft with mold.
My mother shrugged. Things don’t stay still.
The summer ended, the dissertation passed, the flat emptied. On the ferry, my partner and I left the car in the hold, and with it, all of our clumsily crammed possessions: clothes, guitars, books, bedding. I climbed the stairs and stood outside, high above the turbulent water. Watching the strong flight of the gannets, watching that foreign country slide backwards, after a whole year; away, away. Travelling west again, I felt the glass lift from me and my spirit took to the salty air.
In winter, I returned to kneel in my graduand’s robe, to receive my imperfect degree. I wore Doc Martens and bright woollen socks. My parents had travelled over with me, and were both there in that grand hall: my father, who had only recently finished his treatment— he had rung the bell—said that I was to rub the dust off my feet as I departed.
My mother whooped as I walked across the stage.
On the third night of the Camino de Santiago, when the albergues were full, my partner and I were offered a sheet of cardboard on the hard floor of the village’s warehouse-like gymnasium. It was cold, the floor was dirty, the gaping door did not close. It was the only place for miles.
I paid four euros so that I could shower and sing Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem”to myself. We gave our cardboard away to an elderly couple, and with strangers, we drank too much wine and sang songs loudly, and then on that cold, dirty floor, among many pilgrims, we slept.
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Months later, the house we planned to move to—the perfect house by the sea—fell through just a few days beforehand. After reading the message, I threw my phone away from me. As if it were to blame, for things coming apart.
I went and took a shower. I sang to myself.
Forget your perfect offering. ◆
This piece is excerpted from the Winter 2024-2025 issue of Parabola, GRIEF & GRATITUDE. You can find the full issue on our online store.
