BELONGING

Soula Emmanuel on feeling at home

I’m on an intercity train, bound for Galway but for now still stationary at Heuston. My cloth mask is on, the air conditioning is gusting, a child in the row ahead of me is listening to noisy cartoons through headphones, and elsewhere a group of sunburnt young ones are loudly discussing nipple piercings. It’s a time and a place for basking in the moment.

Does it still count as holidaying at home if you never felt at home in Ireland in the first place? I moved back here three years ago to start my transition. It made sense at the time: beginning a new life by returning to the source, taking on fresh vulnerability by returning to a place that almost felt safe.

I assumed it would be a temporary arrangement: that I’d get myself in order and then go off somewhere else, emergent from my shell, the world my proverbial oyster. Perhaps that’s still true, but I’ve been given time and space (mostly time) to think about my relationship to Ireland while stuck here this last year-and-a-half.

It only takes about ten minutes before the train is out of Dublin entirely, rolling into the Kildare countryside. I know so much of the capital and so little of the rest of the country. This island is so much bigger than me and my turmoil. Maybe I didn’t give it a chance.

An older man gets on at Portarlington and has to sit beside me – a breach of the Covid rules, but one I accept. He flirts with the train conductor as they discuss the late summer heat. As we move, he coughs, but then he turns to assure me that it is only a consequence of his lifetime of smoking and nothing more serious. Ireland is full of characters like this, charmers, larger than life people. I’m not one of

Ireland is full of characters, charmers, larger than life people. I’m not one of them. I’ve spent so much of my life taking up more space than I wanted to, and by way of compensation I’ve tried to make myself smaller and smaller.

them. I’ve spent so much of my life taking up more space than I wanted to, and by way of compensation I’ve tried to make myself smaller and smaller.

The man gets off at Tullamore. Here a couple are bickering over a large bag, which hardly fits in the storage space. It is impressive, the effort people will go to for this country. It is a place worth working for. It is beautiful – broad, lush, golden and green. But in my seat, I move across it quickly, superficially, like a bubble along the surface of a lake. I am hugging a place that never seems to hug me back. Perhaps I would love it more if it wasn’t my home. Perhaps I would love it more if I didn’t expect anything of it – if I could appreciate it simply for what it is.

There is a protracted stop at Athlone, as we wait for another train to pass. The child in front of me is now eating supermarket popcorn out of a rustling bag and the smell of it seeps under my mask. Once we get out of the station we cross the vastness of the Shannon, marked on either side by riverside apartments. Ireland is home and it is full of homes. Homes that are too expensive for so many of us, so we watch them go by, with all the significance of the trees and the livestock and the boats bobbing on the river – exterior ornaments of a country that will not let us in.

At Athenry, there’s more of it: old houses and new housing estates, the elusiveness of home. And then I see them, behind the waiting passengers on the Dublin-bound platform. The fence is dotted with children’s pictures, drawings of nature and sunshine. An attempt to make the place beautiful. It strikes me that this platform would look its best on rainy, muddy days. Then the paintings would be windows into a different world. And suddenly I begin to understand.

I enjoyed living abroad because I felt both alive and invisible among the foreign words. Here I am the stranger, in a manner of speaking. But that is the gift this place has given me. The gift of seeing things differently, of being a window.

The train crawls over Lough Atalia, more slowly with each passing second, almost there. I am angry and I am lost but I am home, here on the other coast, on the other side of my becoming years. This may not be where I belong, but it is where I was made.

The train comes to a stop, and the door begins to beep. I get ready to step off.