I spent a week working in the Grand Canal Hotel recently, sitting in on some stuffy workshops in an airless room, flogging a lame old horse. On the final evening I left as soon as was polite and took a walk down by some of my old haunts. Lower Mount St., Grand Canal St. and the basin, Love Lane, where I spent three years of my life. I don't feel that I really lived there. That I had any more substance than my reflection did on that Friday evening a week ago, flung back at me as I walked past the glass-fronted buildings.
I rented a room in an apartment there, in a soulless purpose-built apartment block where I knew the neighbours only by the smell of their dinners in the empty hallways. I'd just started in my first full-time job, just moved out of home. "Don't call me every day" I said to my mam. "I won't have any news and you'll think I'm just not talking to you." I was 24.
I made a point of not going home at weekends. I didn't want to make a habit of it. The apartment I shared was a charmless place, with cheap furniture and a bathroom mottled with mold. I hung fairy lights, sprayed it like a tomcat with Penneys-bought soft furnishings. Played at being houseproud. When I wasn't drinking or sleeping off a hangover, I rearranged the furniture. My dad started referring to the apartment as my "home" and I felt grateful and betrayed.
He and my mam visited me often, making as much of an effort to recognise my independence as I was making to establish it. I took them walking down along the cobbles on Clanwilliam Place, through to the new square that was being built at the Grand Canal Basin, and I felt proud then that I lived there, amongst all those new buildings, the steel and glass and money.
Most of the time, I didn't feel very proud. I felt like a fraud. I was lonely and greedy and young and I didn't know how to go about making a life for myself, a happier one where I didn't feel like I had to stay out all night or wax off all my pubic hair to prove that I was on top of everything and having the best time. I felt like things were running away from me. And so I started a blog.
I wanted attention. I wanted to capitalise on what I thought of (and still think of) as one of my more attractive abilities; my skill in framing a story. I told Regan about my walk back through those years over a cup of tea last week, and how all the suffocating loneliness I'd lived with there came bouncing back at me off every shiny surface I passed. He said he'd hate to live there. "I'd be on Grindr all the time" he said. "I know" I said "sure, I was".
I was referring to my blog, though there was that time I put an ad on Gumtree. I'd had a look at online dating sites but I wanted something honest. I got hundreds of replies, all of them pictures of penises. Well, maybe not all. I didn't look at them all. Some of them might have sent me photos of their wives, or their cats, or their faces.
Keeping a blog didn't change anything for me. I just blogged about staying out too late and getting too drunk and having all the hangovers and waxing off my pubic hair and having the best time. But I was taking the time to sit down and think about it, to put words on it. I wrote about myself in a flattering light, with just enough self-deprecation and vulnerability to be likeable. I left out the bits about destructive friendships and drunken text messages to ex-lovers, about comfort eating and penis photos from Gumtree.
But keeping a blog did change things. Getting older changed things too, getting sense and making friends and falling in love. I began to hold myself to account. I stopped writing as often on my blog. I began to live a little less like everyone was watching.
Walking back along Grand Canal Street last week, crossing the cobbles on Clanwilliam Place, ducking under the bridge and across to Grand Canal Quay, I remembered bringing my parents on a walk there not long after I'd moved to Love Lane, and being so proud of it. I feel embarrassed by it now. I feel embarrassed too by many of the posts on the blog. Well, I would if I had the stoutness of heart to reread them. Each time I'm tempted to delete it, I remind myself of the dearth of photos of me as a teenager. I'm old enough now to appreciate a few pictures of me as I was then, with my shaved head and bald confidence.
I noted the old streetnames as I walked along the quay, towards the river and the bridge to home. Misery Hill and Lazer Lane, Lána na Lobhar, lost now in amongst the elegant new buildings. Once the last refuges of lepers and lost souls hoping to make the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, nowadays you pick your pilgrim's passport up at the brewery.
