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  Her mind wandered and she daydreamed about the night with Diarmuid. He was going to distract her for the rest of the day. She wrote down the snippets of conversation that she could recall, smiling as his voice came out smooth as the ink in which it was written. I made him promise to play for me. “I hate you, drunk me.” In her mind she heard slurred laughter.

  He drank as much as I did, if not more. I doubt he’s getting on any better than I am right now. Why did we drink so much? He may have thought I’d reveal more if he plied me with alcohol. We spoke all night and yet I’m still no more familiar with him than I was before the night started. He can’t dance worth anything, he can play music, he has the cutest accent I’ve ever heard, don’t understand him half the time. I know almost nothing about him. He did wish me a goodnight and walked off without expecting anything. What a sad state of affairs that that is the mark of refinement, showing some patience before trying to jump your bones. How did I manage to be so refined?

  They had talked through the night and she found it was not long enough. The most wonderful aspect about travelling the world was meeting the people in it.

  Shade flicked through her notepad to his addition.

  The song we listened to is by Ludovico Einaudi, I won’t say which piece as I can’t name a single one not worth hearing.

  Shade found a playlist of songs by the musician online and listened to it in the background while reading. It only took two songs to make her decide to download all his albums.

  Here’s some information about me that you’ll learn from this – I’m not well travelled. It’s something I’ve always wanted to remedy. Anyway, here is a list of some places in Ireland that are worth seeing for yourself.

  First is Dún na Ri park in County Cavan. In spring the forest floor becomes a frozen lake carrying the silent chimes of countless bluebells.

  The second would have to be Carlingford in Louth. Beautiful medieval streets, nice restaurants and mountain views. Actually making me thirsty for another pint right now thinking of hiking up Slieve Foye in the morning and hurrying back down for a drink in the evening. Though I’ve already had enough – you’re just after going for another pint. This will be the last or we won’t be fit for that walk tomorrow.

  Third is The Ring of Kerry, so long as you have transportation it’s one of the most stunning places to visit in Ireland. The memory that stands out the most to me was listening to my father go on about how he wasn’t lost but investigating routes he wouldn’t have seen otherwise. You think they have country music here – you wait until you go to a pub down in Killarney.

  This is getting much harder now. Though when I think about it there is a spot in Galway I always visit when down. A little snug by an open fire in the Róisín Dubh. There’s always great ‘craic’ once the music starts.

  Up in Bundoran there’s this surfing beach, you keep walking along it to where the River Erne meets the sea, hardly a soul you’ll meet. Wonderful place for a spot of surfing too. I cannot describe the sunsets there, I’ve not even seen a photo that comes close to doing it justice.

  Shade put pins on her map at the locations he mentioned to try and get an idea of where Diarmuid was from, but it would be a poor guess at best.

  She read the last one.

  Inis Meáin: It’s an isolated island and the place where I met a woman who shared a dance and her thoughts with me for an evening.

  She smiled. I could meet him for lunch, see how he’s doing. Besides it’s a beautiful day. From her window she could see the water glistening with reflected sunlight. Still early on an unexplored island, she motivated herself to go out. She knew she would feel worse if she stayed in bed for much longer.

  She read over what she had written so far that morning.

  I’m sitting still for the first time in months, and the experience of cycling across the United States of America has caught up with me, if only the physical toll. From that first mile to the last I kept thinking, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this’. Now after finishing I still can’t believe it.

  If you’re a regular reader of my blog then you’ll know that I spent three months on that bike. I’m at my most comfortable when I’m moving. My back tyre dipped in the Atlantic on the east coast and over four thousand miles later I dipped my front wheel in the North Pacific Ocean. I pedalled down the coast and then flew back across the country. That flight was one of the more surreal moments of the entire trip. Months of arduous effort, pain, tears, doubt and fear – I covered all that distance in a few hours.

  That’s the feeling I have towards this blog – there is no way I can convey everything here in words. Words are weird things, their weight varies with perspective. For instance, hate is a word I used without much thought. I never knew what all-encompassing hatred was until I encountered my first strong headwind. Most of us have experienced those dreams wherein we run but get nowhere. That was exactly what it was like. I made under thirty miles having expended over a hundred miles worth of effort. If hatred could power a bike I’d have made good time.

  I’m used to the question, “What are you running from?” It is harder for people to wonder what you are heading towards when there is no clear destination. Before I started working online there was the stress of wanting to make more money, to have more space, more clothes. I equated acquisition to happiness: the more the merrier. You see it everywhere, on television, on social media. You see what people want you to see, them at their best.

  I never knew what I wanted to do with my life. In school you memorised answers for set questions to get into college; you’ll get the answers there, was the promise. So I went to college. I felt no agency at all, following the set path walked by my peers and predecessors, trapped within my own limited perspective. The morning commute bus became full of familiar faces, like a dorm room of sombre mutes, people you see five days a week for most of the year and never speak to, only sharing the most recent strains of bacteria and viruses.

  My goal became “escape by any means.” I asked myself what I would do if I won the lottery, if money was not an issue. The answer was always travel. So I made that a priority. In a career you focus on a goal which could be decades off and the lack of progress demoralises you. I can’t even wait twenty-five days to finish an advent calendar in December. With such focus we forget that life happens in the periphery outside of our long term focus.

  I want to share one of the most important things I took from the cycle. Take rest days. The destination is always going to be there – you get to it one piece at a time, rarely, if ever, all at once. It’s the journey that makes the destination. Every inch of effort gets you further from the person you were at the beginning to the point that looking back you see a stranger.

  It’s not about the equipment. This harks back to perception. How you choose to look at something will alter your enjoyment of it.

  Shade stopped and read over the last sentence. She hated every word of it but that was how it always was. Does that sound like a mental illness, looking at yourself and seeing a stranger? She edited until she realised that most of the time she had spent on the blog was now on rearranging words. She was beginning to grow restless with it, so rushed to finish.

  After an hour’s worth of editing the post still felt preachy and self-serving. She sent a copy of it to her sister. Oliva was always quick with unfiltered, critical reviews about what Shade did: may as well help better her writing.

  Shade showered in a hurry and made ready to leave the house. She almost missed the unanswered calls that disappeared on her phone screen amidst the social media updates. Seeing that Oliva was online, Shade video-called her.

  “You look terrible,” her sister said. She leaned in closer to the screen to appraise the damage Shade had done with drink. “Were you out boxing? It looks like you’ve two black eyes. You look like a person who found the winning lottery ticket in their wallet when it was out of date.”

  “Are you done? I’m a little hungover.”

  “You shou
ldn’t be drinking so much.”

  “It was the waking up that did me in, not the drink. You look radiant this morning yourself.”

  “Oh shut up, you never said that to me before I was pregnant. So how is the island? Send me on the pictures would you?”

  “Hey Shade,” Kristofer, her brother-in-law, peeked over Olivas shoulder. “How’s the island?”

  “Pretty sure it’s the same as it has been for the past thousand years or so.”

  “Good,” he walked off-screen. Shade could hear the clink of a small spoon against the rim of a mug and the rising whine of a boiling kettle.

  “It’s going well, I’ve adopted a dog, walked around most of the island and I met somebody last night.”

  Oliva did not miss a beat. “Shade, you’ve replaced ‘hello’ with ‘I’ve met somebody.’”

  “Hey!” Shade said with an indignant and hurt tone.

  “Go on then, tell me about him,” Oliva said, followed by an exasperated exhalation and a cheeky smile.

  Shade thought for a moment. “Well we don’t actually know that much about each other …”

  “Oh, a walk of shame on an island as small as that. There won’t be anything else spoken about.” Crying came from another room and the sound of a dog barking followed as if it was vying for decibel dominance over the child. Olivas eyes widened and Shade laughed. Kristofer left them to deal with it.

  “There was no walk of shame, he was a gentleman – who’s decided not to tell me a thing about himself.”

  “Convenient. Check for wedding band indentation, and look at his social media page.”

  “I’m only here six more days, relax. How’s everything over there?” Shade asked.

  “All is well,” Oliva leaned close to the computer so that only her lips were visible on screen and whispered. “Kris is standing firm that if it is a boy he wants to call it something Icelandic. Can you imagine? Every time I have to call my child it will sound like I’m sneezing and cursing at the same time. You are using protection right?”

  “Stop it, Mam.”

  “Speaking of Mam …”

  “Stop it. I’ll be home at Christmas and no sooner.”

  “Fair enough. So anymore drama on the blogosphere?”

  Shade divulged the daily aggravation of content thievery to scam artists, and idiots who expected her to promote their products in return for “exposure”. Oliva loved any kind of drama, considering most of what she got these days came in the form of children’s cartoons, which always had good, wholesome resolutions.

  “You might consider taking a holiday from all that, I mean your job is one long holiday, let’s be fair, but you know what I mean. You’re not touching a camera or a computer when you arrive, consider yourself warned.”

  “You need to find a hobby Oliva. Pregnancy is making you boring.”

  “Going by the post I read I expected to be talking to a different, more enlightened person.”

  “I wish even a half of that were true. What did you think of it anyway? Too much?”

  Oliva laughed. “Shade, you tick off items on to-do lists before you’ve even started on them. Rarely ones you’ve finished …”

  “Write to-do list. Check.”

  “What made you think that getting fit by spending a summer cycling would change a lifetime of bad habits? Habit’s like a prison for your thoughts. That post can act as a to-do list, a letter from your future self.”

  “I thought I’d feel different, be different, leave my stresses and anxieties on the road. Get a clearer picture of life and what I’m supposed to do with it.”

  “What are you looking for anyway Shade? Talking to you makes me better understand myself back when I was an anxty teenager,” Oliva said in a peevish voice.

  “Pregnancy does not suit you.”

  “What’s your excuse?”

  “Oh damn.”

  They laughed.

  “You need to get out of your head Shade. All you wrote on that blog could be true. You’ve always doubted yourself.”

  “Maybe,” Shade said, without conviction.

  Once the call ended Shade read over the blog again and it only served to reinforce her belief that it was all a lie, although a positive one that people would share and feel better after reading. She wanted to log back on and delete the whole thing, but that was how she felt about almost everything she put out into the world. The cynical side of her had come to the realisation a long time ago that her job was not to promote destinations. What she was marketing was the idea that this life was possible. Make people feel good and they will come back to you, feel a loyalty towards you and click the affiliate links on her blog. People didn’t notice advertisements any longer but that’s what her blog was now: a massive advertisement website with the sole selfish purpose of keeping her on the road. She created the content that, through testing, gave the best return on investment of time. Her readers did not need to know that she was primarily a fiction writer.

  It took four hours for her to be content with the article and only five minutes to load it with affiliate links. She chose her favourite photos to populate the post and then stored the rest away to add to her photo albums later. She had gone from memory collector to hoarder. She edited a few pictures from the pub. Going through them made her smile as the women had delighted in taking photos of themselves. Shade used one of them all together on the dance floor. The caption she used for under it read, “The hospitality here is famous for a reason. After one night I’m a bridesmaid and a godmother.” She hoped Oliva saw that one – she almost tagged her to make sure she would.

  She stopped on a picture of the musicians taken earlier in the night. At that point she had not noticed Diarmuid as the man she had startled on the cliff edge. He had not failed to recognise her though. In the photo he was staring straight at her. Shade zoomed in close on his face cropping out all other distractions. The stolen intimacy from his frozen stare made her blush. She felt foolish, knowing full well it was only a photograph.

  Shade opened her personal email account to send on some of the photos of Inis Meáin to Oliva. The latest unopened email was from a photographer she had worked with in America, Nathan. Shade wondered if there were any outstanding bills she owed him for his professional work.

  Hey honey.

  Shade bristled at the familiarity. Who calls people honey?

  Finished reading that post of yours on the trip across America. Still can’t believe you made it the whole way yourself. Saw some of my photos in there, thanks for the shout out. Hit me up with the dates when you’ll be back in the States and I’ll try make room for you so we can meet up. I can shuffle some clients around for you with enough notice. My services free of charge.

  Yours,

  Nate.

  “Honey”? The absolute cheek of him. Any term of endearment always sounded to her in some way like a passive claim of ownership. Shade went to his social media page on her phone. The latest image was one of him and her. It was not compromising but it did imply a level of intimacy. The caption read, “The benefits of the job”, with a winking emoji after it.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  Opening back into her blog she ripped out all his images and any link to his social media pages and website. Anger and anxiety were rising in equal measure. This was something she could not control, a narrative about her with a different narrator. She knew exactly what she wanted to say to him but she knew she would never send it. It would be too easy for him to manipulate it and put a different spin on her words. Nothing is private anymore. Shade bit her lip, swallowed a new wave of nausea

  She rang her friend Hayley in London. After a few rings she answered. There was the sound of mechanical buzzing in the background.

  “You’re not ringing to cancel on me again are you? Because if you are then I’m hanging up right now,” Hayley said.

  “Hey Hales, sorry for ringing you at work. I can call back later if you’re busy, I’m not cancelling.”

&nb
sp; “Not at all. Working on a full back colouring and this chap looks like he wouldn’t mind a break.”

  Shade told her about the situation with Nathan and as she predicted, Hayley told her she was overreacting.

  “Why do you care? You did sleep with him, right?”

  “That’s not the point. Whether I did or did not is not the issue and of nobody’s concern but mine. Even though I didn’t. That type of behaviour makes my skin crawl, the caption, the ‘Honey’.”

  “Yeah, nah, yeah you’re right. How much did the photos cost?”

  “A few hundred for time and services. If you make a joke of ‘services’ …”

  Hales whistled on the other end of the line. “There’s no way you can use them? I mean could it be possible that it was not meant the way it sounded? Yeah, no. There’s no way of defending him. You’re still coming aren’t you?”

  “Of course. Once I finish up here I’m straight over to you.”

  “Okay we can talk about it then – will take you to spin class, see if that cycle across America has you ready for one of them.”

  “The amount of times you mention spin, I half expect to see it as the name plaque of your house. Go on, I’ll see you soon. Thanks for putting my mind at ease.”

  “Go on, I best get back to work, this lad is looking a bit nervous now that the call is ending.”

  Shade tended to react first and then reason after the fact, but more often regret. At least there would be no links from her page directing people to his photos. What other ones does he have?

  Fresh air and warm sunlight greeted Shade when she finally left the house. She spotted a few roan cows grazing along the airstrip. Using the map the shopkeeper had sold her, Shade made her way down a small grass track off the tarmac road. In New York it was impossible not to notice the skyscrapers, but she never thought of them as their composite parts. Here though, with the dry stone walls, she saw the incalculable hours that must have gone in to creating and maintaining them.