I had cycled to Clontarf to be near the sea. Weeks before, I read that large bodies of water contain negatively charged ions, which stabilise mood chemicals and boost energy. There was a storm moving in quick; light rain but dense. On my ride through town, people had dragged on me to the point my optimistic mood was eclipsed by a moon of insubstantial substance; the ebb of too much stimulation and not enough flow. To darken the afternoon further, there was a new crack in my phone screen, and a swarm of infinitesimal raindrops did, of course, catch a breeze and nip in under my hood. It seemed futile in my affected tumultuousness to swipe them away, and I relented to let in the rain. Eventually, I let those tiny, almost invisible raindrops guide me gently out of the fermenting storm.

A lime green concrete shelter beckoned me to sit on its cold, grey, dappled lap. There I thought of sitting on warm-boned young women from my past as I gazed out over the inanimate, brown coloured Irish Sea. The shelter’s walls were colder as if they’d long been jealous of warm arses in windbreakers and sent them away, and the wind and rain had driven off even the hardiest of lichens. All life was absent but for me and my phone that insisted upon living. I put it in my pocket.

After a while, like a stranger with intrusive thoughts begging for a friendly face to unburden them on, something from the recent past pushed into the shelter. A few days before. A warning not to, and I had. That thought lingered in a woman’s cautious way, saying, only a fool runs into storms.

I must be a fool so, I thought.

She, whoever she was, and I deeply fear she thinks I know more than she might like, echoed my thoughts then. Vestiges of a shelter’s loneliness and something in me that understands the symbiosis of negatively charged ions, which we might leave behind us.

Quite literal, she said dismissively, then went onto swiftly pressing matters: only a fool tries to fight his nature.

Voiceless, she was, yet present in whole boiled-down chapters.

Perhaps only because I’m sheltering, alone and bored of my pensiveness and this college course I have undertaken at fifty, I thought.

Only a fool thinks he is bigger than the storm in him.

I looked up at nothing much and thought, this is true in fairness.

He can win over it and beat it back….

Okay, Jaysus.

And nature, she insisted, is what it is, and…

I rushed into the storm to escape… just for a moment, but it was the distinct lack of  her impending doom that drove me further,  with the promise that I could wander through life’s chasms and vaults without piqued by the infinitesimal drops I’d prefer not to indulge. 

There is only adventure. Reckless bloody adventure.

I was right. Completely calm in the wind and rain, I stumbled into another shelter. A much longer one with seven or eight windows and no glass. A good fifteen feet back, there were two fighters sparring MMA moves, carried out in slow practice. After my little chin nod to the middle-aged one of Indian descent, the trainer I assumed, I sat with my back to them and peeled an orange, the third of the afternoon. There I listened to the grunts behind and assumed much in transience of my earlier brush with mother nature.

Glancing back, the much younger lad with paving-slab Irish freckled skin, slick white yet weathered, was teaching the older Indian man. He stopped and stared at me until I looked away, which pleased him, I assumed given the unfriendliness. Their grunting slow sparring thing continued to be an interest to me, something more in the younger man and his anger, which went ahead of all he seemed to know about the art of pugilism. Was he really the master in their equation? Or was he getting something from simply posing as a teacher?

It was interesting to watch them with sideways glances, particularly the Indian man’s fading will to master something he did not innately possess; a wildness and power he could never match in the younger man, as if he should have to live centuries more to find such a storm in him. I thought, how was it that this older man, at least fifteen years ahead in many obvious ways, had gone through life without seemingly ever once having to find some anger? I imagined him normally weak shouldered, skulking into backgrounds, watching the creations of a world not for him. I peeled my fourth orange. It was bloody nice.

I listened to them for a while and watched the storm on the horizon as the clouds grew darker and more menacing. Determined grunts accompanied light punches. I picked up on the young master’s entitled barks at his older pupil, “move yourself,” “pick it up,” “straight jab.”

Furnace black clouds and cannon blasts of wind called an end to proceedings, signalled by the sound of ripping open the Velcro straps of gloves. Peeling my sixth orange, I began to think that the young man had too much to prove and had developed in him too much self-belief. I felt a tinge of hate… hate is too strong a word, I felt disgust that he had so much pride in himself at his tender age. I might have intervened to preach about him thinking he was bigger than any storm but it was the Indian man who had removed the straps at the first growls of thunder, and shouts interrupted those intrusive thoughts.

As a Velcro strap was forced closed for another round, I heard her speak to me again: no man’s talent will ever be bigger than his recklessness.

To my amusement, the older man clocked his master square on the chin. The crack was sweet. I imagined it would linger with the Indian long, and in the concrete’s fissures and cracks too. I glanced back and saw clearly the lessons behind his unmasked countenance that said, “You can’t cheat life, or even out-storm it. The smart way is to lie down and wait for it to pass.”

There was some agreement amongst us two, who found ourselves facing inner storms, and why we are drawn to chase them.

To beat them.

There, the truth, anchored in nature, which people forget or ignore until it’s there before us, settled on us. And all while the wind blew and rain spiralled around the concrete shelter, we grew calmer.

And if you are really smart, you wait until it is at your back before you get up again.

Bloody good advice, I thought condescendingly, as if in full-blooded conversation with her—before my arse made me a promise the if I ate another orange it’d send a second storm.

As I left the two sparring (gentler) men to their interests, I found myself driven from behind by a gust of thought, thought that the young man was more of an expert than people gave him credit for (which explained his frustration); I could relate too. It had been lost on him and now he saw something of it. Self awareness and perhaps even self love. That face said he had faced storms his whole life and had mastered them if not quite pugilism (given he’d been clocked by a rank amateur). It was a clear and present feeling that I had seen instantly in his boyishly sharp eyes on meeting him but did not know what I had seen. Those eyes said, why would I bow down to the likes of you?

Why indeed. I dunno.

I doubted he ever saw that look in his own eyes, mirrors are rarely so reflective; the clarity of his outward identity seemed ephemeral and grasped at clumsily. Too late perhaps, unless someone older and wiser tells in some clear eyed or cracking way.

As I passed, I fist bumped the Indian and gave the Irish a solid look, each an imprint, which perhaps went barely noticed, would be needed during some passage of time. I left my feeling of how I had once a face so wilfully and neglectfully misunderstood by the world until I started listening to her while I ran.

I looked back at the Indian, he had clearly lived a life of ease and acceptance and thus became nothing in storms, wilfully. His face spoke of a deeper connection to storms, how they will always find you and his admittance that he could not lie down every time. That was why he was there after all.

Further alone the coast, something lingered between us: an understanding in the moment, we would, in a strange absent way, stay with each other until the end of time. Perhaps in those timeless voices that quietly live inside us and seem to come out of the cracks of old shelters. They paint colours that spell: there comes a time when you have to read the weather, see past the face of storms and gauge whether they are as mean as they look. Sometimes her nature is coloured so you run into them, just stand in the eye to know they’re just like you.

BUS ROUTES

There comes a time when a person thinks he can learn nothing more of value to him other than the lessons found in everyone around him. 

September 2024 was the coldest in recent memory. I find myself back in that deeply contemplative place where the gravity of starting a new phase in life makes waves in my stomach. Turning fifty and feeling twenty seven hit me hard. Strangely not painful but with a sense of undeniable reality. As a working class artist of thirty years, with minor success and long spells of perfecting my myriad of hobbies into talents, I feel a sense of ultimate control over my wares. 

After my writing class, I exit through the college doors with a young man, Aaron, thirty years my junior in tow. He’s a boy really but quietly self-assured; a strange mix of anxiety, curiosity and arrogance. He begins to quietly walk the oak-lined winding road behind me towards the white front gates. In class his bespeckled bluish eyes often flash to me from beneath his brown curls. Open and empty eyes. His constant reliance on my approval and not Dave’s, lounging as he teaches, tells me he respects a certain type of man. One more like me, I presume. In comparison, Dave has womanly ways; sensitive, floaty, always willing and malleable and seemingly often confused, yet remains to me a man. A man who is overwhelmed because he believes, in typical male fashion, that he can handle everything he invites onto him. This has made him full of hubris and self reflection; an assured unwellness. It’s a sick feeling in the head that’s begun to transfer onto the class through his intense eye contact. However, everyone is hunting a witch hidden amongst the students, and me being someone that is comfortably numbed to life’s trivial pricks, they think I’m a prick in hiding.

“How did you find that?” I ask Aaron, slowing to let him catch up.

His words are always short and curt. “Yeah good.”

“It’s a big adjustment for all of us, including Dave. How are you finding him?”

“He’s alright.”

“Grand. How are you getting on with the change?” I ask, kicking a stone up the driveway.

“Whaddya mean?” he asks curtly, as if the reason for his bluntness is not down to anxiety and a lack of understanding of the big bad world.

A little smile fights its way into the corners of my mouth. “Ah, ye know.” I decide to change the subject to me. “I started a course there last year and struggled with the adjustment.”

“It’s grand for me so far,” he says.

I laugh to myself and realize that during these intense glances across the room, I’ve picked up more about him than he realizes. “You’re fine are ye? Ok grand,” I say, in a way that puts him in the closed off and toxic box.

“I mean… I dunno, it’s eh… yeah.”

“You’re Dad is quite prevalent in your life, isn’t he?”

He looks up at me, the first time on our saunter, says nothing for a few steps and then, “How’d you know that?”

“Ah, I know things.”

Rather than being curious to see what more I might know about him, he says,. “How?”

“People are the same the world over. Our minds work in much the same ways; like bus routes.”

“Whaddya mean?” He stares at his dirty white Vans as we walk.

“Generally we’ve the same basic needs, and everything else is like bus routes to and from that point.”

“Oh right, makes sense,” he says, lifted.

“There are a millions of routes and a few major stops at intersections.”

“Like getting a job, house, wife and kids.”

“We can get stuck at stops.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“Like your Dad being a major influence in your life: I can tell that your Mam is influential but he’s dominant. Hence, you’ll respect men more than women.” I look down to see his eyes glaze over and widen. “It’s why men don’t really like Dave and that’s why he wants to get me out of his class. He wants easy, malleable people.”

“Yeah, he’s a bit of a weirdo.”

“He’s a bit overwhelmed. That’s another stop on a different route: someone who overestimates their capabilities usually ends up in divorce and dependencies on sex and substances to deal with the extraneous pressures they bring into their lives.”

“Oh, I get ye now.” He looks at me and smiles as if I have assured him that his instincts about me were right.

“So you, for instance, will struggle with women.”

“So I’m stuck on that route?”

“Not if you take the wheel of the bus and change lanes. That means you have to put all that stuff from your upbringing in the back of the bus.”

“Or kick it all off.”

“I tried that, you’d need a lobotomy.”

He laughs before his face darkens. 

“You can’t hit the accelerator and speed away from life, Aaron. You’ll only speed into people’s gardens and pick their flowers. You really do not want to go in there without permission,” I say, aggressively insistent he not mess mine and quietly stare at him until he looks away.

He nods and fixes his eyes on the gate. 

“I’m a bit like everyone myself. I kicked off the people who caused me problems, family and friends, but they’re still there. I have problems with women because my parents argued all the time and my mother claimed me, my dad claimed my brother. Dave probably had a similar situation with his mother. That can be very confusing for people to understand. So you know, best to not go digging into their inner workings, or you’ll inherit the pain and sickness they struggle with and incur their wrath for digging.”

His mood quickly becomes a simmering sort of aggressiveness. Towards himself, I assume and quickly kick the stone up the road. I sense that I’ve changed his entire world, which is again not to his liking and explains to me his curtness.

I slow. “Cool so,” I say. “What time are we in tomorrow?”

He goes back to being that open and empty eyed boy. “Ten.”

“Sound, see you then.” I stop to check my phone. 

As he goes, I watch him; the route from self-assured and determined to someone who watches his step carefully but with a greater sense of himself.