Offerings
Saoirse E. Doyle
Free tickets, my friend offered me on the phone. To a benefit breakfast for the homeless at which Tara Westover, author of Educated, would be the keynote speaker.
I panicked. Homeless myself at a few points in my life, and susceptible still to the needle of scarcity—how anything free has to be received—my gut burned with sudden urgency. Maybe Tara Westover would say the one thing I needed to hear to knock me out of my writing stupor? After all, she had managed to achieve what I most hoped for: a best-selling book. A well-written one at that. Maybe proximity to her orbit would transfer, by osmosis, some component absent in my own makeup. Maybe I would meet others there who could become kin.
Who do you think you might ask? my friend pressed on. How many tickets should I set aside? Three? Four?
As the number rose, so, too, did my terror. Not one person flashed across my mind, not a single face to light up with this unexpected gift. I scrabbled for names. I wondered if hidden within this gesture was some kind of test from this writer friend who has become, in a fairly barren social landscape, confidante and ally. Maybe this was her wooden horse to find out if there was anyone else to whom I was close besides her. Years spent together in a writing class have provided us with a steady friendship, phone calls and coffee dates that have morphed from craft-class post mortems to life discussions, these, the new cornerstones of platonic relationship, slowly placed. It bothered me how quickly suspicion stalked yet again this critical attempt at intimacy in my life, how shame simultaneously pressed its nose against the windowpane of unwanted exposure. My cheeks flushed with heat. I was glad to be alone, at my makeshift dining-table desk and its incomplete state, littered as it was with half-finished poems, stories, essays, as though some part of me fails daily to find the permission to complete anything. Not writing. Not friendship. Not life purpose, whatever that might be.
Feeling put on the spot, I flashed onto the only two Irish people I know fairly well here in San Francisco. We are not close. Social, yes. Close, no. But in moments of trouble, how quickly the savage in us turns to our own kind.
Noreen, I said. And maybe Linda.
Three tickets then? my friend said.
Make it two.
Next day, I texted her: I’ve decided to pass on your kind offer. Those I might primarily invite work weekdays and are not available. Plus I have therapy on Thursdays which is non-negotiable.
Those I might primarily invite prompted me to do a mental run-through. There could be a quiz later, a further examination of my social circle. I found relief in the fact that there were quite a number on that list: 12-step program friends, writing friends, older friends, siblings.
I began to feel less pitiful. Still, the list, now healthy, presented itself in a much more populated way than the actual truth. Which is that I live alone. I spend a great deal of my time alone. Which has become, of late, a rather unbearable state.
Maybe, too, my attention now rests there. On my aloneness. In a new way. What was once the fortress of my safety—don’t reveal your inner self, don’t let anyone else in—now feels like a stone tomb with no exit. My own isolation the treacherous legacy of childhood abuse at the hands of a neighboring farmer. The itinerary of his impact now constantly on my mind. It pops up, just like this, on the heels of what was likely an innocent offer from a friend, and finds me examining, yet again, the state of my half-finished life.
It has been five months exactly since I spoke with Irish detectives and gave them a blow-by-blow account of my childhood decade of torment. When I was done, the female detective thanked me for my candor. The male detective said: You have just described a heinous monster. I felt my job was done. It wasn’t. It isn’t. There is a long investigation ahead. But this act of speaking into the open, specifically into the open of criminal justice and its processes, has set something else in motion I cannot quite name.
It is as though I have now released a tally. The tally of damage. Not that I haven’t spent twenty years picking apart, with recovery and therapy, the nitty-gritty of my past history and its grip on my psyche. But that now, there seems to be a companion story that I couldn’t allow myself. The story of all that has been truly lost. By virtue of that one man and his actions.
But how it expresses this week, with this friend’s casual gift, is in the comparing mind. In that frame of insufferable reference, I listen to my writer friend rattle off luncheon dates with childhood friends from India who all live now in close proximity to her Palo Alto residence. I wince as she recounts family gatherings where her two brothers, two sons, doting husband, ailing father, four best friends, and countless other spokes of her village wheel create festive birthday celebrations or wedding anniversary ceremonies. I feel jealous of her full life, which seems, by its stream of never-ending people in and out the doors of her home, to draw the eye to the lack of bustle in my East Bay apartment.
Jealous, not in some green-eyed “I want what she has” way. I am neither straight nor a mother. I never wished to be the former, and lost my chance to be the latter for various reasons related to him and all the shelves stripped bare of a future by his predation.
Unlike my friend, who has a seeming string of primary people, there are none in my life. Not here. Not close by. No partner. No family. No relatives or community who, for better or worse, become the net into which I truly lean when my own legs give out.
The truth is this: I long for such a village. Filled to the brim with smiling, kind familiars.
The truth is also this: I lost a village when I came out as a lesbian. Twenty-plus years since family and parish found the word lesbian anathema to my prescribed lot. Oddly, this was the same village who could not cast a single stone in the direction of a known pedophile. But could find many fists with which to grip the epithets hurled at me before my exit. I have never felt rooted since. Not completely. It isn’t as though I was under any illusion about the tribe to which I then belonged. Any tribe that can renounce its own for being gay is not a tribe but a jury. Still, within the cocoon of all the conditions that made up that community, I belonged.
For a while then, in my early twenties, after my return from college, I had people. Not many. But people. When asked, I could list friends, at least a half dozen with whom I drank to blackout on regular occasions. I could list elders who depended on my company—my auntie across the way in our tiny single street for whom my nightly visits were a continuation of my father’s habit after his passing, this, too, an ill-fitting cloak which gave some warmth for a short while, to replace the dead.
Then there was my best friend, Mollie, fifty years my senior, who seemed, in her willingness to speak to her ache for a dying tongue and its crossroad gatherings, someone capable of addressing the layers of existence where I lingered. On those winter evenings, after a day of teaching, I would drive the two-mile stretch to Mollie’s shoreline cottage. Ensconced in rockers at her range, we would sip hot, milky tea, nibble on digestive biscuits that I had brought as my ceremonial offering. After gossip and chitchat, we would delve into the brimming contents of a handwritten songbook she had kept since childhood.
Pick any one, she would say, and read it to me.
And, like a god, I would select some dog-eared sheet, cut from an Ireland’s Own magazine and pasted delicately to a copybook page, and share the lyrics of an old Irish song. Beloved words to which Mollie’s glaucoma had slowly blinded her.
Even as I stumbled over native phrases and exquisite sentences that were, like the generational ink and fastidious penmanship, fast fading, she taught me how to seek the good even within the bleakest of visions. I read. Mollie sang. We repeated Irish words that sounded smutty. Laughed out loud. Peppered our chats with those inferences of crudeness. Innocent humor that took its root from the inherent wordplay and pliability of a native tongue among whose gifts was nuance that simply couldn’t be translated.
Mostly, it was Mollie’s compromises I understood. Her long-widowed practice of calling out to a made-up husband when hawkers came to the door selling carpets so they wouldn’t think she was a woman who lived alone. This made-up world a familiar stance to me. I lived with made-up people in my mind all the time. Myself primarily. Some other version of me who was out, and safe, and accepted. Some version who could find a woman to love, bring her to the local pub, hold her hand, sit among the straight, married couples. Unafraid.
Unafraid of anonymous letters through the post with the lines: We know what you are. Filthy dyke. Unafraid of being followed while driving home on lonely country roads late at night. Unafraid of some neighboring farmer who might follow through on his promise that a fine poke from a big bull was all I needed. I knew loneliness. Even then. In that village.
But now, twenty years later, I find myself lonely in a new way.
Is this the place where we all arrive at some point? A point, no matter our history, where we find we have made agreements about how we should live our lives, the cautions we should take, the things we should hide, the compromises within which we will surely find acceptance.
I did not expect that a kind gesture from a friend would hurtle me down the road of my own loneliness. Of facing the bare truth of the number one thing on this tally of damage, a tally suggested way back in one of my first calls to the Dublin crime line. Way back then, a female detective said, Make a list of what has been taken. It may stoke your rage enough to allow you make your report official. To say yes to an investigation.
At the time, I had thought, that tally has been part of every therapy session for God knows how long. And I discarded the notion.
But now, come to find out, it does matter after all.
So, here is loneliness.
This is the deepest cut.
This is the thing I would gladly list to any judge as the first knife wound. The excision of people from my life. The cutting out of my trust with anyone.
It is a humbling realization.
Not that I haven’t known this on many levels over the years, how abuse breeds loneliness. But that I haven’t named it as part of a tally. Which makes it less mine by nature and more by violation.
I ask my therapist: What do I do with this loneliness? I always thought it was mine. But now I know it is his. What do I do?
Think of a friend, he suggested.
I did.
Think of having a really good conversation with that friend.
I did.
How do you feel?
Connected, I say. I feel connected.
Do you feel alone?
No.
What are you doing to not feel alone?
I am showing myself, I say.
How?
With words. With things from my insides.
And do you feel safe?
Yes.
Seen?
Yes.
Like you belong?
Yes.
To what do you belong?
To conversation, I say. To interaction. To community, even if it’s just a community of one.
It has been several weeks since my friend’s offer of those tickets. In the interim, I have observed the places where I used to stay outside the conversations I had with others. Outside the connections. Outside the offerings. Like somehow, I didn’t belong.
Sometimes, it is vital to name the damaged note in ourselves. To simply say, alone. Test it for veracity. Check that it is truly ours. And if not, to find the antidote.
For me, I have taken the good orderly direction of my therapist.
Lean in, he said, to those moments of connection. Don’t look for the loneliness. Look for the loveliness. Water that.
I’ve had my watering can out for several exchanges now. I can’t tell you how it’s working exactly. It just is. I feel closer now to people. To people who were on my list all along.
My friend who offered me the Tara Westover ticket sent me the book instead. A signed copy. Inside, she wrote, To get you started on your own tome.
Saoirse E. Doyle's writing has appeared in String Poet, Peregrine, Sinister Wisdom, The Courage to Heal, and The Magic of Memoir. She has spent the last twenty years attending writing workshops across America. She was a Lit Camp Writers Conference scholarship recipient; a Pat Schneider Poetry Contest Honorable Mention winner; long listed in the National Poetry Competition United Kingdom in 2017; a Winner of the Eastern Iowa Review’s Lyric Essay Contest in 2018; a Top Ten Finalist in the Fish Short Memoir Prize contest in 2018; and she received a literary residency at WordSpaceStudios in San Francisco this year. An elementary school teacher for ten years, she is currently a writing workshop leader. She enjoys photography, searching for the elusive “perfect chair,” and public speaking.