Okay, slightly freaking out.

At the weekend I got a WhatsApp message…. From David! It’s been total radio silence for months then all of a sudden this: Hey D. Long time. Heard you were in NYC. I’m in town before Arctic shoot. Want to grab a pint?

Heart doing somersaults. Stomach churning. Mind (that was, let’s face it already in a pretty fragile state) now spinning at 180 rpm. You think a chapter in your life is over. You’re convinced that it’s done and you move on. I’d done my grieving, I’d been through my stages and I was firmly and comfortably in acceptance. Then this. Everything just gets thrown back up. Almost literally!

I wasn’t sure what to do to begin with. I thought the best option might be to just ignore it. I’d left all that behind in London. I’d managed quite successfully to rebound with Ciarán (and I’ll be honest a few others – I may have not been 100% honest about not making friends here, but you know… a girl needs a few things for herself.) The point is… I had fully moved on and now all the crap had just came flooding back. After about ten hours of just staring at the message and being completely paranoid about the fact that he will have seen those two ticks that mean I’ve read the damned message. Fuuuuuuuuuuuu… So, I replied.

We went for lunch. Not dinner (that’s a date), not coffee (that’s pretty much a prelude to…) Lunch. Lunch felt safe. It felt formal. Business like. Maybe I would hire him to take photos for the company website or I could offer to consider his work to illustrate a story. Or something. I was grasping at straws a little. I just wanted him to know that this was not going to be a friendly encounter, this was… I had no idea what it was going to be. Business?

It ended up being nice. Nice as it could be, given… He was apologetic about London and being away all the time and… Well just all the rubbish we went through. He’s met someone who also travels, but they’re keeping it casual. He looks good. I kind of wished he didn’t look so good, but he always did. But there was a moment in the meal when I sort of realised that his being so good looking made him kind of beige. A little bland. There’s not that much that’s interesting about him. Maybe that’s why he points his camera at such diverse and interesting things, because he isn’t that interesting. Nice, just not that interesting.

After ninety minutes I made my excuses and left. I walked back to the house with this mixture of relief and sadness. Relief that, yes, I really was over him, but sadness because it made me think about London. About Ireland and Auntie Mon. I thought I was settling here and just beginning to feel like this is where I belonged and then the past comes up behind me and taps me on the shoulder.

I called Mon the next morning to make sure that this feeling wasn’t anything serious. It wasn’t of course. This is right. This is home now.

While on the phone I took the opportunity to try and get a bit of clarity on my childhood and anything more she had about my dad. Her answers all seemed to be a bit vague again. She did say that she had some stuff of mom’s in the attic and she thought mom might’ve kept some things of dad’s. She said she’d dig it out and send it over to me this week. I really believe that if I can understand more about him, the Greens, then I can get a better insight into the kind of company I should be building. Maybe the life I’m building too.

DGx