Walk Across the Rooftops

Originally posted November 22nd 2023

Outside my kitchen window it goes straight to a roof. It’s been building up falling leaves. The cold air reminds me of Ireland, something about how the hallway smells. Damp most likely. I climbed out the window and looked over to the street in the late evening. I will confess to having a smoke, something I don’t do normally anymore, but that evening was an exception. When I lived with my grandparents in my late teens, my bedroom window went out to the roof. Many evenings I spent sat outside there, looking over neighbours backyards. I tried to smoke cigarettes but didn’t know how yet (sorry Heggy). It was the same room I have my happiest memory, 17 years old dancing to Teen Suicide’s album waste yrself.

These roofs are very different places, in Brooklyn, it’s grey and brown and the end of November. In Dublin it was green, the skies were clearer, even on the miserable days there was a sense of a beginning. Now there is a sense of ending, though I do not know for what. Maybe it is the mere act of aging, the other night remembering my next birthday is 30. I contemplate all my regrets whilst looking out this window, the view being the roof then a white wall.

There is a place in Wexford, Ireland called Tintern Abbey. Most of the original Abbey itself fallen to pieces, only some walls here and there, a a pillar that as a child I stood in and felt great awe. The restoration was a success though, looking proper put together again. There’s a café that’s always closed. It’s where family bring the dogs and in younger days my cousins and I would go off path to get lost in the mud. A moss covered wooded area contained another building, much worse off than the main abbey. It has always been covered in vines and I always forget what it used to be for, if I ever knew. A bit further on a small graveyard and church, also gone to ruin. The abbey was built in the 1200s by William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke. The fact that any of it still stands is remarkable really. It hides most of its parts within the woods, random stones peak out from behind trees, you touch things perhaps no one has touched in hundreds of years. It is always raining.

There is a stone bridge that goes over the aptly named Tintern River. I don’t know how many times I’ve gone across it. And it’s an easy observation to wonder how many others have too. This place, once for work and worship, is now the destination for Boxing Day walks. It’s where I’ve wandered as a child, a teen and an adult, as has my mother and her siblings. Did my mother also stand inside the pillar and look up, trying to see the roof in the darkness?

What becomes of something when it loses its purpose? I don’t know if anyone still prays at the abbey, maybe some come through and see the still intact stained windows and let themselves thank god for it. Now it sits near a hotel and a golf course, there are summer camp orienteering groups running around (I once was one at 13, imagine the mud on our clothes after a day there, my cousin and I seemingly determined to be the messiest of the lot). Though I do not pray, I feel a sense of ritual or worship to the place, but I believe that to be the case with any place in nature. Did they build a place for god here because it was already there?

I have been thinking about god a lot recently. The other day my sister and I walked past a woman who shouted merrily “God bless you all!” and handed me a blue piece of paper that asked “Why do we suffer?” I joked to my sister that I was the perfect person to ask, at that moment sleep deprived after a several hours long panic attack, which resulted in me missing my flight to California. She left for Paris later that day, so I’m left alone to my thoughts. The blue piece of paper ended up in the recycling but I could see it over the next couple days, too wasted on sorrow to do any chores, including taking that bag of paper and cardboard downstairs. That little bit of blue poking its head out to mock me. Eventually I grew tired of the mess and now the piece of paper sits in a blue bin somewhere.

My sister and I after receiving that piece of paper, talked about god. Or more so, I talked about believing in god. How I was considering doing it, which is a very funny thing to “consider”. I am not interested in religion, but I am tired and it would be nice to believe in something. But the closest I’ve ever felt to something godly was not in mass or chapel. I do recall the boredom of Sunday nights as the chaplain went on about something as I braided the green ribbon bookmarks in the song book. Someone taking the blood of Christ only to nudge the cup to get a bigger gulp of wine. Skipping it completely to hangout with the smokers only to get caught. The closest I’ve come to godliness, or at least an theological interpretation of godliness, was walking alone with a box of frozen dead ducks. I believe I’ve told this story before, but I had never felt so at peace with my place in the world. For a brief moment, I had found my purpose, which was carrying those ducks from long term to short term storage. I was wearing an orange top, my hair was similar to how it is now, chin length with the front dyed blond.

Like Tintern Abbey, I wonder what this girl is now without her purpose (for starters, I should probably stop infantilising myself and say woman instead). I make not a sad but observational fact that I am no one’s best friend or lover or colleague. I am not needed to carry those ducks anymore. I used to be those things, and in them I found myself. I prefer myself with purpose, I am less self-absorbed. I am able, for instance, to get on a plane to see my friend but instead I am alone at home thinking about god. I say these things not because I want pity, for the love of god don’t, I say it because I am mourning it. I have become a person defined by their guilt and regrets when I know I have not always been. And I’ve said a million times how I’m sick of it. And so I think about god and forgiveness and moving on. How does one forgive themselves when they believe they are unforgivable? How does one change when they feel that change is impossible?

It’s raining outside. There are some leaves on the roof still. Wires string along the wall with barbed wire on top. I checked the weather in Wexford and there’s no expected rain until Sunday. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and it will be like any other day. I wonder if it’s reading week in Ireland and there are people crossing over the Tintern River for a walk. I think it’s fine that the abbey is no longer its intended purpose. It’s time as a place of worship ended, but it’s still there, just its situation and context has changed. You get the parallel.

Thank you for reading,

Enya xx

(named this substack then realised it shares a name with an absolute choon)