The Day I Questioned Chance

May 20th 2016 Song of the Day: Uncharted by Sara Bareilles

Planes are not my friends. For someone who loves traveling as much as I do, you’d think I would find at least one mode of transportation I liked. But I hate them all �" cars, buses, bikes �" and airports always cause problems for me. Cancellations, delays, airplane sickness gravitate towards me like moths. I even had to sleep in the Miami airport once due to a missed flight. So obviously, as my parents drove me to the airport to catch the flight to Ireland, I had a very large knot in my stomach. However my airport misfortunes were not the only thing on my mind. You see, I screwed up.

Flashback to the second day of class, where a screwball with hair down to his neck decides to talk to me. We shall call him Jeff. One thing leads to another, and by the end of the week, we are dating. Of course, being the beginning of the year, everything is still unsure, so we break it off to just be friends. I stupidly make the suggestion for him to ask out this other really pretty girl in our class, who will be named Cathleen, and I lost the only friend I made yet in college. Six month pass by, I have continued on, and only have to deal with the small awkwardness of seeing them every class. My own love life can only be defined as tragic by this point, so second semester I had decided to take a break from dating. Then one day comes, and I get a message from the no-longer-shaggy-haired boy saying that he broke up with his girlfriend and was wondering if we can be friends again. Against all of the better judgment of my friends, I start talking to him and history manages to repeat itself, only for a month instead of a week this time. While the relationship was doomed from the start, someone had to go make it worse by breaking up with me the very night before I left campus and a week before we went to Ireland. I cut him off as much as I could and spent the next week making plans for a completely independent summer.

Come to today, where I must see his face once again after a long week of silence, and not only that, but I realize I must spend a whole 2 weeks on this trip with him. But then comes chance. Chance being the both of us being mistakenly pulled over by the TSA and later ending up next to each other on the plane. Of course, he tries to talk to me, even though I had made it clear before that I trusted he wouldn’t bother me during the trip. I still talk to him, and we talk about how we really did not care about each other and how it was our conversations from the beginning of the relationship that drew us in, our banter. I’ve also been watching a lot of Veronica Mars before this trip and I had Veronica and Logan’s relationship on my mind, so I told Jeff that I didn’t want to end up like that, always breaking up and getting back together a year later. I did agree, however, that when we are both 41 and if neither of us has found someone, we can try again. But then he also tells me this short tale about how when he went to show Professor MacKenna his passport, apparently one of our condoms from before had been in it and fell out. He then exhibited a want to use that condom, and I don’t know if he wanted to use it with me, in which case he better get his head out of his a*s, or if he wanted to hook up with someone else in our class or in Ireland in general, which confuses me, because before he told me that he hated one night stands. Whatever his end game is, I give him the simple, “You do you, honey” and change the topic. Honestly, I have no anger towards him, so again, against the better judgment of my friends, I make the choice to try to continue to be his friend during the trip. We’ll see how this goes.

On a less angsty note, before I left for the airport today, we had to stop at the salon my mom works at to pick her up and also for my father to get a quick haircut. As I sat waiting, I get sidelined by my mom’s coworker, who knew I was leaving soon for Ireland. She asks where I was heading, and when I said all over, she asks if I was going to Galway. I said yes, we should be there for a couple days, with one of those days actually being in the Aran Islands. She smiles and says that when she and her husband were talking about retiring they decided on Galway because it was the perfect blend of isolation and city life. Her husband was seventh-eighths Irish and while she wasn’t Irish at all, she always was drawn to the country, traveling there often with her husband and even learning a bit of the language.

The thing is, her husband died years ago. She hadn’t been to Ireland since 2000, when riots were still happening often in Northern Ireland. I know this woman well, as she has worked alongside my mom since my mom started there and she has even gone to Brazil with us. Looking into her eyes to see the bittersweet feelings she had towards a country that brought her so much joy and happiness for the future only to know it will never happen now made me have almost a sense of purpose for this trip. I want to embrace the bittersweet nature of Ireland, where you have to leave it all behind to reflect on what it means to be you and where you find the sublime between happiness and sadness.

Author's Note

The song of the day is just supposed to provide my general mood for the day, through both the lyrics and genre. This entry is shorter than some of the others, but let me know if some more general background info is needed.