Today, on Mary Oliver’s birthday, I’m sharing an essay from almost six years ago, written about a very important weekend spent alone in Copenhagen.
I am alone in the non-priority queue, right at the very front, hoping that the kind lady at the Ryanair desk will ignore my much-too-big bag if I’m the first person she sees: a bag that, if I’d been booking on my own, I would have happily paid to bring with me onto the plane. I’d have been more than willing to pay the tenner or however much it is, to knock this feeling on the head; that feeling like I’m about to be caught stealing nail polish in Superdrug or dobbing school (neither of which I’ve ever done).
A bell starts to ring above all of our heads, and Dublin Airport begins to feel even more like school. The bell doesn’t seem to want to stop, and soon the staff are growing irritated as folk start asking questions: as the process of scanning is silenced by the ringing in this increasingly high-pitched soundscape.
I’m not with the friend whose 40th birthday we booked this trip to celebrate. When she cancelled, a handful of weeks into me going sober, it only took me a few days to see how much of a gift that actually was; how absolutely essential it was that I still went. I am completely on my own, utterly solo in the queue, as the last passenger from the priority queue is keeping all us non-priority folk back. Her passport has only just become invalid today and we are all waiting to see if she is allowed to travel- given that she’s only booked a one-way ticket. The guy behind me has already been taken aside to get the ‘talking to’ about his bag and I am standing there doing that nonchalant thing, you know, that solitary pose that so much, I hope, resembles a heron that knows it is being watched: calm and collected, with only the slightest whisper of discomfort. To keep the appearance up, I turn to that tried and tested method of drawing attention away from myself as a lone human; I take my mobile out of the wee pocket where it is nestled in safely with my passport, and log into Instagram. And so it is there, in the queue to board a flight to Copenhagen, to spend more days alone than I have in quite some years – heralding my first time alone since I became a non-drinker, underneath a broken bell that feels like it is echoing on my nervous insides – that I lose Mary Oliver.
The news of her passing comes to me, both then and in the days that follow, over and over, in the form of beautiful imagery accompanying a variety of her poetry. Birds (not starlings) in a pink winter sky was the very first image I saw, standing there in the queue, and it came along with the ending of ‘Starlings in Winter’. I have always loved those lines, feeling drawn back to them often like a moth to a flame, but something about the context of the beginning of that solo trip made it feel like I was reading them for the very first time. Cheesy as it sounds, those words defined that trip: a fact for which I feel very grateful.
My friend’s seat fills the void between the body of the man beside me and my own, as the plane lifts up off the ground and into the Dublin sky; a sky aglow with an almost full blood moon. It is the only empty seat on the whole plane, and we share the space her absence has afforded us both: he – with a woolen green hat, me – with my journal, pencils and a copy of Alys Fowler’s memoir ‘Hidden Nature’. The man tells me he was very lucky to get a seat. He’s caught up with some immigration issue and is on this flight due to a problem in London. He moved from Nigeria to Copenhagen thirteen years ago and had no idea that the island of Ireland was broken up - North and South. He asks me which part I come from. I tell him I come from Derry; ‘at the border’. He asks me about Brexit and I laugh; we both do. He falls asleep and I open my book where I left off, finding these words on the page;
‘We tell stories and draw maps to make sense of who we are, where we are, why we are. Sometimes we get stuck telling the wrong story about ourselves: the story does the telling when it should be the other way around.’
I think about all the women I know, and of their stories. Of who they are, on the inside and outside; on both sides of that imagined border. I think about myself, and of that shifting, liminal space between inner and outer; the belly of that thin place where we hold our rawest truths. I consider the new paths that I can already feel forming on my insides, just a few hours into this trip; I can feel the shape-shifting begin. I am becoming an unmapped space, in the air above the Irish Sea; where borders hold no sway.
I arrive in the city, late, and with the hunger upon me; like a wolf. I get off the train a stop early – the heightened vigilance that has settled onto my weary, solitary bones; too keen in its communication with my brain. There is frost on the ground as I emerge, moth-like, from the wrong station, and the first building I see is the very pizzeria I’d read about on a ‘Sober-Girl’ site. It is the first of many things that happen, seemingly coincidentally and utterly outwith my control, that are exceptionally good things. Things that, I know deep within me, would not have happened if I hadn’t been on my own. I sit sipping my mocktail, marking my first time in my own sober company, in public, with various strokes. I draw, I write, I Instagram the moment because: if I don’t - did it even happen, right?
If I couldn’t scroll back for an image, would I even remember sitting, immersed in real-life hygge, with the smell of snow on concrete, in the soft grey-yellow glow of the world as candles soothed my tired, grateful eyes?
Without the permanence of those marks would I lose the memory of that night I arrived, alone, in Copenhagen, with hipster waiters complimenting the wild canary on my left arm - the bird that flew onto my skin the day I was brave enough to
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