I am riding the bus to the train station. It is friday afternoon, and the bus is busy. I am nearly late, I have shopping bags hanging off every arm and a heavy backpack. My mobile rings. It is elicia, saying that she isn’t going to make it down to visit on the weekend. It’s a long way – an 8 hour journey by bus, and with a one-year old it just doesn’t make much sense. And I’ll see her next weekend anyway, and then again in Canada. It’s ok, see you soon. I heft my bags off the bus, one hand holding the phone and the other grabbing onto the railing in the stairwell of the double decker bus, trying not to let the sway of people getting off the bus shake my balance.

I am riding the train back to cork. It is friday afternoon, and the train is busy. In the last minute before the train departs from the station, a teenage girl and a young boy sit down beside my co-worker and I. They’re travelling to Killarney, and they’re speaking in northern accents. Are they going to see the Corr’s concert? No. The heat sets in and I lean back into my seat, trying to let the sensation of being pulled backwards across the country soothe me while the trees out the window blur as I purposely relax my eye’s hold on reality. I feel a small bit nauseous.

I am sitting in my living room, on the couch that maura and gavin left behind when they moved out. Some day they will come back for it. I must buy a couch. A plastic wine cork is sitting on the table, and the corkscrew is in my hand. Dissapointment, deadlines, transaction codes, dirty bathtubs, spiders in the corners of the ceiling and some shadows flickering in the corner of my eye pile up in a great smelly heap in my mind. I think about this test that Alison linked to, and inadequacy seeps through me like black ink. I wind the corkscrew horizontally through the plastic cork, then I wind it through the same hole but in the other direction. I make another hole above that one in the same fashion, and then another below the first hole. Then I make three more holes perpindicular to the first three. Then I start to pick at a bit of plastic hanging off one of the holes. I can’t quite grab it with my fingernails. Suddenly I throw it back on the coffeetable and sit on my hands.

I am walking along the road in the pouring rain. My rain pants swish swish swish and I can feel the force of each raindrop hitting my plastic hood. I can see a drop hanging right on the edge of my hood, waiting for the moment it’s weight is forceful enough to surrender to gravity. “I definitely prefer kinetic to potential energy,” Lee said last week as we waited in a stationary train for an hour and a half for a switching fault to be fixed. There are giant puddles everywhere, and the raindrops are hitting them with such force that the surface of the water is covered with boiling bubbles. Tom’s rain pants go swish swish swish beside me. We come to the edge of the park. Some distance down the road there is a loud explosion and what looks like water shooting out of a drain. My heart is trying desperately to leap out of my chest and run away home. “What the hell was that?” we ask one another. Was that the force of the ocean rising up through the drains with such power that it blew a manhole cover into the air? I think it was. We walk along the road in the other direction, tiptoeing like children around land mines.

Today I am vaccuming, cleaning the bathtub, repotting plants, evicting the spiders, finishing jobs I’d promised to do ages ago, organising my stuff, preparing for my journey and praying that everything will turn out alright.

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