“And something was in the air, a sense of quickening and of change that fit itself to the mood of burgeoning spring and then went beyond it, into danger and the potential for violence.”—Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay

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Every day I lose the grasp of my hours. I'm not the only one. A friend confessed at a wedding: I miss the days when we didn’t have to be social. Always it seems I am trying to write and failing at that. Writing has become more like nip and tuck, plastic surgery on memory and time. The results are never quite as beautiful as one hoped. You keep working on it, measuring and scraping and smoothing away, but the essence that called you first to the raw material becomes further and further lost.

Meanwhile the angel of illness had visited friends and neighbours. H celebrated the end of chemo with leis and cake. Noel, who always called me young lady when I met him with his dog on the street, returned from ICU seemingly good as new. On Teapot Lane, Frank the bachelor died suddenly and had been buried in his native Crumlin a fortnight by the time I noticed; I wondered what happened to his wee barky dog.

I am alright when I really think about it, despite the exhaustion and constant running to-and-fro. Last Thursday I took the train to Dublin to see a periodontist after waiting for months to see him (there are apparently ten in the country), and returned with suture-laced gums. On the trip home, I sat near two college students returning home. For the next three hours they watched music videos on their phones, slugged vodka from a plastic bottle, and took snapchats of the tiny bitch they let roam up and down the aisle. The girl had the boy (brother? gay friend?) rub tan onto her back, before changing into a mini dress and putting on makeup for a night out. The next day, raw-mouthed, I went to a wedding by the sea, attended by the local soccer club and half the town, one of those big unwieldy weddings typified by a mediocre meal, speeches mined with in-jokes known to a tenth of the attendees, and awkward dancing to Irish country music.

Beyond my world, there was cruelty and violence and desperation; I was physically separate from all of that, for now.

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What I saw, then: the faithful double-parked beside the church; a jackdaw tearing out tufts from a doormat; a waxing moon while lambs bleated in nearby fields; a pair of magpies (two for mirth) perched on yellow gorse, scolded by a female blackbird; woods speckled with bluebells and white butterflies; a loose bouquet of yellow May flowers laid at a doorstep for Beltane.

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