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TALES OF AN ORANGEPEELER

an archive of pleasures, wounds, sublimations
& other curiosities :: profile


03.13.22


Tonight the pub is hosting the afterparty of a wedding: our Sunday band resumed playing and now there’s a DJ and everyone is singing at the top of their lungs. But the pub isn't heaving as it would have been pre-2020: hospitalisations continue to rise and dire reports stream in from other countries about yet another wave. At a recent local wedding party, everyone got covid except for the bride and groom.

//

Still: I stayed up in the bar after closing until 4 in the morning last night, slinging back gin and sodas to Dolly Parton while chatting with friends as Sam begs for peanuts.

Ewelina and I bonded over our horror of border control and our love for vampire TV shows and Magic Mike. I like her alot: she’s straightforward, self-deprecating, and engaging. We make plans to drive through Scotland to reach the Outer Hebrides to see our friend Anna's art exhibition in June. Anna and I chat about her father, who committed suicide when she was 8; how both of us search for signs of our lost fathers in the stories of others, even if the others are dying too, even as the stories are rarely ever fully recovered. It’s the yearning, the desire to know, that’s crucial. We also talk about how we’re both transplants. At the age of 12, Anna migrated to Dublin from the Isle of Lewis where her family have lived for generations. Her art attempts to recover the lost world of her childhood, by reclaiming a Gaelic material culture that is also becoming lost.

Gazing at my friends’ faces glowing in the viscous dark, I thought of how I was only getting to know them now, after ages of being known to each other. Somehow this strange time was the right time, the appropriate moment for when our selves could rub against each other without recoiling. I could feel great slabs of ice breaking inside me, grinding against each other in the spring thaw. Winter had seemed immovable and vast, but its country was shifting, shrinking, the coordinates of my spirit no longer obscured.

//

I finally saw photos of the hard copy of my book, a collaboration with a friend, her gorgeous photos of flowers and cats taken at night, my essay about those photos, and walking around at night as a woman. There they are, our names on the translucent cover. This is mine, and already I’m letting it go, into the world, for others.




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