my year of rest and emigration

a survival guide for when your friends move away

Emma, Isabelle, Sinéad, Tara, Killian and Di after HONEYPOT, February 2023.

There is a fantasy version of my life where all my friends live near me. Everyone is located, at most, a thirty-minute stroll away. None of us worry about being turfed out by landlords or the health complications that could arise from living with toxic levels of mould. We see each other while doing the food shop and laugh as we brush hands reaching for the same bunch of bananas. We say “pop over, I’m home” and “be there in 10” and “want me to pick you up anything?” We meet at the pub on the corner on an overcast, chilly Sunday. We occupy a booth and order pints and crisps for the table. We tear the packets open at the seams so that everyone can take a salty handful to shove in their mouth. The group grows as the hours pass by. We are joined by housemates, lovers, friends-of-friends. They throw their coats and scarves on top of the growing pile we’ve amassed in the corner, a heavy, woollen mountain of our love.

I was 23 when I watched Frances Ha (2012) for the first time. Greta Gerwig plays a 27-year-old dancer who goes through an existential crisis when her best friend moves out of their shared apartment to live with someone else. “I’m so embarrassed. I’m not a real person yet,” she says in one scene, trying to explain why everything seems to keep going wrong for her. I was going through something similar, feeling unmoored after the loss of a friend who I thought would be in my life forever. I watched it in the living room of the apartment we used to share and wondered if the acute pain of feeling abandoned would ever ease up. I talked about it in therapy and she told me to think of life as a train. Some people—maybe our family, although not always—get on at the start of the journey and remain a passenger until the final destination. Others come along for part of it. They arrive around five stops in and you can’t believe that you had been travelling without them until now. And then, at some point, they leave. Some do it abruptly, leaving you blindsided and wondering where it all went wrong. Others will not be a surprise. You will visit their new home and feel in awe of the life they have created for themselves. If the time is right, they might even get back on your train at some point. You will always have a seat saved for them.

Two of Emma’s sisters are twins. I met Isabelle and Tara when they were 11 years old. I had just started dating Emma and was internally spiralling at the thought of meeting her family. We played Call of Duty and they absolutely annihilated me. They were hilarious and smart; I was charmed by them immediately. They are both going on Erasmus—Isabelle in the first semester and Tara in the second. This means that they will live in different countries for an entire year. The last time they came to visit us in Dublin, I read their tarot cards on the floor of our living room. I did a three-card spread and the last one symbolised their next step. Tara got the Six of Swords, which depicts a man rowing a small boat across a body of water. Isabelle got the Three of Wands, which shows someone standing atop a cliff, looking at a stretch of sea ahead of them, watching a boat in the distance sail away. The cards have positive connotations. They both depict expansion, adventure, and evolution. But we were struck by the parallels when we put them side-by-side. An inevitable fact of life is that, when you go somewhere new, even if it is the absolute best thing for you, you have to leave some things behind.

During summer, Killian officially broke the news that I knew was coming for a long time; he is moving away for a while. I was in the post office when I saw his text. When I reached the top of the queue, the man behind the counter pretended not to acknowledge that there were tears in my eyes. Certain people colour your day-to-day life so much that it feels impossible to imagine things without them. At HONEYPOT, I instinctively find myself looking for my friends. I search the crowd of bodies for Killian’s floppy hair, Tara’s buzzcut, Anna’s slicked-back ponytail. Often I will find them all together, and I will think about how lucky I am to have all the people I love together on one dance floor. I don’t want to let them go. But I also know that the many of the reasons I love my friends is because of the reasons they want to leave. Haley Nahman has posited that the things we find challenging about our friends often have an opposing, positive trait. For example, someone who is always late might also bring an energy of fun and spontaneity that your life could otherwise be lacking. My friends are endlessly curious. They are not content with staying the same. They want to put themselves in a distant country and come back with stories to tell. These are the reasons I love them so much. These are also the reasons that they must go.

It feels as though the itch to emigrate is an inherent part of the Irish psyche. People often ask me if I want to move away from Dublin. My answer, as of September 2023, is not right now. I expect this to change at some point; I have wanted to leave before and I am sure I will want to again. There is a great amount of character building that comes with being shared shitless in a place that is totally unfamiliar to you. There is a reason so many people make art about that exact experience. It can be incredibly life-affirming. But Dublin still has something for me. I am never sad to arrive back here after being away. As a teenager I was desperate to leave the small town I grew up in. I still remember how it felt lying awake at night, waiting for my life to begin. It began here, seven years ago. During that time I have moved house, started jobs, thrown parties, drank my body weight in Guinness, cried on the bus home, stayed out late, made new friends and lost others.

Lily moved to France this summer and the other day she gave me a call. I forgot how good it felt to hear her voice, how naturally we slipped back into our specific cadence of talking. I wanted to hear all about her chic Parisian life—the people she has met, the apartment she lives in, what brand of cigarettes she is smoking. But she wanted to hear all about home. “Tell me about Dublin,” she said, so I did.