CHAPTER NINE
Daddy and I continued with our relationship in sips and shots and we were both smitten in no time at all. We avoided talking about my leaving, and I even started to catch myself making plans with him into the future, a future that wouldn't fit with my current studying plans.
Daddy would just look at me funny when I said these things, rather than tell me that those time lines didn't work: that I would be back in the states by the time certain dates came around.
I talked about St. Patrick's Day in Ireland, I talked about spending summers together along the coast (Galway was already on the coast and had some beautiful - if very cold - beaches). I talked to him about my staying longer without actually acknowledging that I couldn't. I just dreamed, because it was all that I could do.
Then one day I told him that I didn't really want this relationship of sips and shots anymore, hell, I didn't even want to go back to America and study law when my time here was up. That was something we both already knew. I simply didn't want my time to be up.
When I told him, it was mid-way through a break down I was having in my kitchen. The break down was no fun, and it wasn't one either of us wanted or had planned to happen, but it was happening none the less.
When I burst out that this was not what I wanted, Daddy simply looked me in the eye and told me, "I was wondering how long it would take for you to say that."
"What?" I asked, confused.
"I was wondering how long it would take for you to realise that you didn't want to go back home and study law." He told me.
I stared at him, incredulous. I just had nothing to say to him.
"Well?" He asked.
"I just, I feel like I am doing what everyone else wants me to do and I don't want to have to do that anymore." I told him as he nodded along to my words. "I just, want to do things for me. I want to live my life for me rather than for my family, or my college, or whatever."
"Okay." He told me, "That's normal. So what are you going to do about it?"
I was frustrated at his words, just what did he mean what was I going to do about it? I didn't know what I was going to do about it! I just knew I couldn't live like this anymore.
"What do you mean 'what am I going to do about it'?" I asked, frustrated.
"I mean, if you don't like it, only you can change it. It is your life, after all." He told me.
I cocked my head to the side and thought about what he had just told me while staring into the space between us. David just shrugged and got back to tidying the kitchen. My temper-tantrum was over, I was not in a position to complain any longer, and he wasn't too concerned about my previous complaints right now either. He was just going to do what he had to do in the kitchen.
After a few moments, I realised how small this stuff was and how stupid I was being, then I felt a little ashamed of myself.
"I'm not sure." I told him, gathering myself. "Maybe I should take some time to think about this."
David stopped what he was doing and gave me a single nod. I returned it then excused myself. I had plenty to think about at the moment and really needed time to myself to mull it all over. I had to think about this weird secret relationship I had gotten myself into, about my leaving, about what I would be going back to in the states.
I knew I wanted to stay here with David and just study creative writing, but that was a knee-jerk reaction, and not a solution to any of my problems at all.
I still had a family in the US and friends, I still had responsibilities to my community and I had worked hard to get where I was - even as I wasn't anywhere special in particular - to walk away from everything.
People at home would just think I did it all for a man anyway, chalking my running away to Ireland up as a 'phase' or something I had purely done to keep what should have been a short-term fling going.
The more time I spent with David though, the less it felt like just a fling. At our cores, we were very similar. We had similar values and outlooks, even if externally we were packaged differently being from different places in life, different ages and different cultures.
He made me laugh, as the romantic comedies say, but there was also more than that going on. He bought many of the fantasies I had had about men and relationships to life in a way I hadn't thought possible.
As a woman in the twenty-first century, I had been bought up with fairy tales and stories with happily ever afters alongside cynical beliefs of my elders that love doesn't last, or isn't real. Or at least that it's different to the stories we tell ourselves.
It is true that love is different to stories, love is better than our stories could ever imagine it to be. When you're with the person who is really meant for you, it isn't rainbows and butterflies all the time but a warm contentment, something that you don't resist against, but something you resist against being told what to do about.
Or at least that was what I was doing in my situation that was what was true of my relationship with David.
I left David's house and wandered down to the sea side. I went for a long, long walk along the beach and thought about all of my problems as I walked in one direction: about how nothing was working right now, and how everything was a mess.
Then, when I walked back I thought about all of the things I wanted and how I could have them. It wasn't like there was a famine or a war in either country, there wasn't anything really big stopping me from moving around, or getting an education, or telling someone that I loved them.
I did love him, and I had never told him that.
What did I want anyway? I thought as I walked back along the coast. When I stopped resisting it because of what I thought I should do, or what I knew others thought I should do, or the expectations from anyone at all, the answer came to me so quickly and so painlessly it seemed stupid that I had ever thought about it any other way.
David was right, I needed to take action when I had problems in life and I knew exactly what I was going to do about it.