When you start a dalliance by kissing a girl in the snug of Neachtains, the heart starts to dream of wildness in Connemara and The Burren, of Fisherman’s Blues and the Flaggy Shore. Of putting your arms around her and shaking out the cobwebs together, of wandering out on a Saturday morning to kick the wall on the prom, ever so slightly hungover from pints of Guinness in Árus na nGael the night before. Both of you just tired enough to take the edge off, but alive enough to feel the heart swell with the presence of each other.
Before all this, you’ve no notion that you want something so… Galway, and so badly and deeply for that matter. An unknown need! A delight, and a surprise! You’re too busy dreaming of New York and Berlin to even notice every time you spin through the town what delights can be had by giving your heart so completely to the wesht, but in there time it takes for a pair of lips to connect and a spark to jump across the gap, the whole damn idea comes in like a flash from the heavens and refuses to let go. Like pure Galway stubbornness, it sticks there through all sorts of terrible weather.
And of course it never comes to pass or turns out quite right – for one thing, she’s never heard Fisherman’s Blues and you never quite reach the level of comfort with each other to gently shake out any cobwebs without feeling like you’re being jerked around violently. Wrong timing or wrong people – who knows? You break each other’s hearts, and lose yourselves along the way so completely that you have to go off to places you’ve never been to see if a piece of yourself has accidentally ended up there. Places that are a long way away from Galway.
