Michael Harding: Memories of the women I lost and that kiss on a sofa in Ennis

I suppose you can’t marry everyone you like, so the older I get the more memories I gather of women I lost, or to be more accurate, women who let me go. Or to be completely truthful – women who escaped. Women who took one look at me and said: “I wouldn’t touch that ejit with a barge pole!” And I often remember women who opted for someone else; dear friends that I longed for and never quite succeeded in bringing into a close embrace. I suppose love is always a feeling of incompleteness.

I hovered over one particular woman many years ago, as we kissed lightly on her sofa in Ennis; a portion of time that ever afterwards replayed in such slow motion that I thought it was an eternity. And the kiss may have told her we were unsuited, because instantly she left the sofa, made tea, handed me a mug and vanished out of my life forever. In fact, she emigrated to America.

And then recently she phoned out of the blue and we joked about the kiss, the mugs of tea and her vanishing act.

We agreed to meet in Galway when she was home for the Christmas. We were older now, and in less danger of setting each other on fire with chilli con carne or bottles of blue nun.

Overwhelmed by a kind of sadness

The meeting happened last year and we both approached the table with the restraint of old negotiators, giving nothing away. We flirted a bit, fired compliments off as clinically as ambassadors from estranged countries, but we never risked ourselves an inch beyond the comfortable idea that we had always been friends and nothing more. After apple crumble, coffee and a single brandy she went off to her world and I went off to mine. It was no big deal, I told myself all the way home in the car.

My beloved was in Warsaw at the time so when I got home the house was empty and the wind had blown leaves across the lawn. I took the rake out and went under the trees and was unexpectedly overwhelmed by a kind of sadness.

And because there were no lights on in the house I felt lost in the woods as the darkness seeped out of the ground and I stumbled across an old tree I had cut down years earlier and twisted my ankle.

And I felt a strange humiliation at being stuck in Leitrim. My old friend had travelled the world, settled in New York, and talked with sophistication about modern novels. I had remained in Ireland, clinging to the rivers, lakes and hills of my childhood, writing sad memoirs and never wandering very far from home.

I suppose that’s another consequence of emigration; the scar on those that get stuck at home. The worthlessness people feel because they stayed behind. I’ve often seen the naked pain of it in the faces of parents at Knock airport, as their children stand in line with boarding passes. Although I’ve seen excitement too in the children; a sense of adventure and liberation at leaving home. I can’t deny that.

Lost in a wood of my own making

But without young people the west of Ireland can feel very empty. Sometimes I gaze at a damp coat on the back of a door and feel desolate. I drive through empty towns on Monday nights staring at ghosts, or search for old friends in the vast forests of spruce, up the slopes of mountains that were once fields of hay.

In Patrick Kavanagh’s time this pain surfaced as rage. But it’s too late for rage now. And since I planted every little sapling that now makes a woodland around the house, I suppose there was something comic about feeling lost in a wood of my own making, when I twisted my ankle. The birds fell silent in the twilight. They weren’t bothered about where they were. In their wisdom they just sat on branches, open-eyed and savagely attentive to the present moment. And as far as I know they don’t have a word for migration, and they don’t make a fuss about coming or going to Africa. They just do what comes natural.

I limped slowly up the hill onto the patio and found the front door locked. For a moment I panicked, thinking maybe I would be in the woods all night at the mercy of magpies. But of course the back door was open, so I fumbled in, lit the fire, turned on the television, and journeyed with the Good Wife, Alicia Florrick, through all the pretty rooms of that makey-uppy faraway place called America.