"I also miss my friends a lot, Gianni, Anselmo, Oliviero, and the others. I don't have friends here. I even miss some parts of Rome. There are other parts and other friends who I miss but who I also find repulsive. When nostalgia and repulsion get mixed together then all the places and people we love from a distance seem to sit at the far end of a broken, impassable road."—Happiness, As Such, Natalia Ginzburg

I leave for Galway on Sunday and return on Monday, and in between there are cafe meetings with friends, five art exhibition openings, and more chats in bars, over gin and soda and even rounds of tequila, until we're disgorged onto the street at half 3 in the morning, among the crowds looking for compatriots, lifts, taxis, and takeaways.

It's all very intense, this social life, the interactions fraught with jealousies and insecurities, the chats about the art scene, toxic relationships, work. R asks me if I want some MDMA, and I shake my head: No. I want to dance with my senses intact. To distill the night into a body, my irreducible body, dancing in the dark.

Do you miss Galway, V had asked. I don't know. I miss my friends. But Galway has changed, and so have I. And it's haunted, by an ex-husband, the best and worst moments of my life, by past iterations of my self. As I'm leaving on the bus, P sends me a video of me dancing and a text saying he had lunch with someone who had been on my dissertation committee: "She said that your thesis should have been a book." What would I have become, had I stayed in Galway?

I am wary of nostalgia. I hunt down any sentimental thought about the past and kill it. I don't want to look back. I don't want to think about the things that did or didn't happen. I must live in this situation, as unresolvable and impossible as it is, and make the most of it, as much might be made of it.

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