Status: Absolutely Not Complicated with Dublin

I like walking. I like to inspect my surroundings, press my face against the glass of store windows, inhale the life humming around me. I like to be a tourist, camera in tow, and figure out how to get from point A to point B with a map—and I like trying to get there without. I like to crouch on wobbly cobblestones and take pictures from below. (Maybe because I liked the way another tourist did the same).

The Dublin Castle area

I like passing a clearing in the park and watching an older gentleman fold himself criss cross applesauce on the grass and stroke—yes, gently and casually stroke—a swan, nestled into itself for sleep. I like sitting on park benches and reading, but getting too distracted by the seagulls skimming the water or couples using their pocket-English dictionary to decipher a guide to Dublin. I like getting into a quick conversation with a park worker who immediately, upon hearing my accent, asks, “Ye from the States?”

I like coming upon bookstores and combing through three floors of shelves, with the sound of a street performer out the open doors singing “When I’m Sixty-Four” and “Girl”. I like walking past bakeries tucked into corners with fruit pies and brownies filling their windows and thinking, I need to go there.

I like calling this city my home. It hasn’t been mine for very long, and won’t be forever, but it’s where I sleep and eat and study and breathe and thrive. I like the life it provides—the stories, the history, the people. I like that everyday feels like a journey into uncovering some great café, pub, museum, route to class, or place to sit and write. I like that a world is being unveiled before me each moment, and that I have so much to look forward to in the next one hundred and nine days.

I don’t like that the first week of classes has come and gone, because it just goes to show what a speedy-arse four months we’re in for. Not to mention the travel plans, the volunteer opportunities, the dance classes, and the study that precedes abroad that I’m very excited to tackle but afraid for how much quicker they’ll make the semester.

But I won’t worry about that yet. I like the present. I like having no destination.