The sunshine breaks through the heavy sleet shower castigating the peninsula, ice pellets aggressively crashing against the dirty living room windows like bullets of freezing spring. I relish on having just finished building a miniature house model with plastic pieces of a puzzle that invite to dream, for this seems to be a time for building brick by brick, the foundations of a rather interesting future. 

I pour myself the last of the Aperol left in the bulky bottle and I am hit by the sweetness of a citrus sunshine long gone as a memory of indulgence in the Italian coast, the sharp alcoholic bitterness that follows a clear reminder of the toughest winter in history. 
The rain stops and the air grows moist with the smell of wet grass and toasted olive oil. The birds outside chirp almost in unison to the chime of the air fryer cooking salmon steak and today, as I sit in front of the laptop, cold red drink in hands, I finally seem to float over the lightness of the late sunset around me.

It took two further lockdowns to learn lessons, and it took losing and regaining our freedom twice again to finally test them. Indeed, it took me over six months to gather words to break my writing hiatus, in a time in which a travel log was rendered irrelevant. A time in which bile bubbled up our mouths as the winter closed the distance between cases and deaths, and a state of constant hangover reigned over numbers that would determine our freedom.

Little did I know that days after my last post -and my last trip- our pandemic numbers would rise in silent protest to the reduced sunshine of winter. That we would enter and exit the season in complete lockdown. That our attempt for a normal Christmas would be a charade that costed lives at the expense of Captain Morgan and Fanta strewn on the kerbsides of the capital. A Christmas in the countryside, amidst fears of infection as gift were exchanged, a Christmas of foreign flags waving at the chilly Cooley wind unable to fly home.

But the New Year brought people together, and the ‘toughest winter in history’ made us appreciate the warm smile of friends defying borders, made us find comfort in the embrace of focaccia-soft words over cups of black coffee, allowed us to purify our thoughts on the clear mountain air atop the peninsula and find humanity in the earthy smell of a mare.

Job descriptions were updated and meetings grew in an almost nonsensical number with an accountability not accompanied by remuneration, triggering waves of false hope through video calls. Sales pitches offered to synthetic smiles across the island in a bid to regain control of the days of pandemic stress and the nights of Pinot Grigio numbness.

And the days turned to weeks and months of yet another suspended animation fuelled by the craving for routine. Fitness projects for the muscles and art projects for the mind. One by one, walking by small milestones and relishing on the small wins that followed. On the ability to once again travel outside of our five kilometres, or the news of parents being vaccinated abroad. Tank full, car ready, and Easter eggs across the border. Another set of interviews, another set of smiles. Another set of waiting, and a new outcome.

Just like the spring sunshine of this mid-May evening, a promise to be part of team Pfizer, AstraZeneca or Moderna broke amidst a heavy sleet of sanitary sorrow, and over weeks of patient waiting, we learned that our lives were and will be changed forever, our beloved appropriately now remembered like the comforting beams of warm light now reflecting over the wet asphalt roads of Louth.

I sip on the last of the glass and smack my lips on the last of the bittersweet of its flavour, for tomorrow I will be in Dublin starting a new chapter in life, sweetened by the bitterness of the struggle left behind. An empty glass awaiting for a refill of better times suspended in an elixir of new challenges.