Why? Everything in me needed to get unstuck, and now I’m more unstuck than I want to be. What am I doing, period? I have no place to go home to anymore. Two weeks gone, and I didn’t like Ireland nearly as much as I thought I should. It was too rainy even to go out for walks. I bought fresh produce and put it by the window to keep it cold. I stayed in a hotel, discounted for winter. Lace curtains and water-stained cottages. It turned on and off 10 times a day, like a spasming faucet.Įverywhere I went, I scrutinized the houses. I took long walks in the rain-hard rain, wispy rain, cold rain, warm rain. The pubs were all still drenched in Christmas garlands. I was surrounded by Irish people, breathing Irish air, eating Irish apples. Six hours later, I woke up in a tiny cottage with cube glass windows, like the pod of a spaceship. I didn’t understand a word my taxi driver said, but I tipped him 10 euro and wished him a happy new year. Could those tourmaline eyes of my ancestor see me setting foot on Irish soil, all the way from storage in North Carolina? I told myself I was home. My first view of Ireland was the peninsulas of County Cork, patched green on blue like a stained glass window. Then I boarded my flight on New Year’s Day. That fall, I pet-sat in exchange for accommodation all the way up the East Coast, and celebrated Christmas in my hometown. Traveling indefinitely wasn’t just a daydream. a living wage, through my online Patreon patron community. In addition, though I wasn’t cash-rich, I had three forms of wealth that can’t be measured in dollars: 1. But I found that it would actually be cheaper to live on the road than it was to live in Durham. I drew up a budget, expecting the cost to be exorbitant. So the idea of a new life took shape: to travel to Ireland, reversing my ancestor’s journey and then from place to place, indefinitely, until I found somewhere better to be, and some way to stay there. Family lore held that she came from Cork. Her glassy tourmaline eyes watched over 11 years’ worth of labor-two novels, five plays, eight pledge drives, 60 journals. In my study in Durham, where I quarantined, I had a family heirloom: a portrait of my great-great-great-grandmother, Mary Ann Hartnett. I had to create a new life on my own terms, instead of continuing to let COVID create it for me. And a simple surgery to restore my writing arm had taught me, in no uncertain terms, that privatized American health care would destroy my well-being as surely as any disease. My career ensured that I would always be part of the precariat. Who would take care of me if I contracted long COVID? I was 41 years old. And a Democratic administration that chose corporate profits over the health of its people. Meanwhile, developers with earthmovers had gouged up all the places I loved.Īs a science fiction writer who studies the near future, part of me knew that it was only a matter of time before late capitalism would uproot me, too. Now we were being forced to return to “life as normal” while the pandemic raged on. It was the same street where my friends and I used to do theatre-in a black box, a storefront, a park, a condemned garage, the street itself. The pandemic had erased my life, and I had to start over.Ī few months before, I walked along Foster Street in Durham, N.C., looking for an outdoor café where I could work safely. In September 2022, I gave most of my possessions away.
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