by Sara Gilbert
I moved out of the house a week ago. Pao “accidentally” locked me in our room for almost 24 hours, and somehow I was the one to get kicked out. At least Aoife couldn’t hold the difficult roommate label over my head anymore. For weeks, all I did was look for apartments and sleep.
I found a place on the north side of town, packed up my three giant suitcases and rolled up the maps from the walls and caught a cab on Baggot Street as the bankers walked past me in their posh suits and put-together lives. The driver didn’t even help me put my stuff in the car. He sat up front and watched me in the rearview mirror.
The drive to Dublin 3 wasn’t long, but it was a different world. Posh bankers and investors were replaced with people stumbling out of bars, accents so thick I couldn’t differentiate a “thank you” from “who are you”. Everyone I saw had eyes long glazed over from whiskey and pints, including the landlord letting me into my new house. His name was Damian or Corbin or something that ends that way—I didn’t catch it the first time and then was too worried about my own English to ask.
When I was in school in Brazil, I was the best English speaker in my class—the Americans even asked where I was from. In Dublin, I can barely understand anything. Liz said it’s because they mumble. Thomas said it was because of some sort of “linguistic evolution” dating back to when England ruled Ireland. Liz told him to shut up, and then they started fighting about pretty much everything. Neither of them were any help.
Damian or Corbin or whatever mumbled something else as he opened the door to my apartment and handed me the key. I thanked him, even though I wasn’t sure why, and pulled my suitcases through the small hallway. The warmth of the radiator hit me in the face as soon as I stepped inside. It was at least 26 degrees Celsius—and thanks to Liz, I knew that was around 80 or so in Fahrenheit—and the stale air was suffocating.
I spent an hour putting away my clothes in silence, both reveling in it and waiting for Pao or Liz to bust through the door mid-rant about dinner or class. Even as annoying as Pao was, she would have let me know what I missed. Hell, even when she locked me in our room, she brought the assignment sheets from our professors. Technically speaking, I could have gone to class and still have been able to pack my stuff and get here on time, but I could only handle one draining activity at a time, and since I had to be out of the boarding house by the next day, the move was it.
The loneliness didn’t settle in until dinner, when my maps were hung, and pictures littered the surfaces of the bedroom and kitchen. Ali wasn’t there to cook. There wasn’t shepherd’s pie that tasted vaguely of cinnamon or curry covered chunks of overcooked lamb. I didn’t have to eat between 18:00 and 19:00. But I did have to eat alone. The idea of ordering a pizza at midnight wasn’t the same without the group of us huddling in front of the old boarding house TV and putting in whatever DVD we could find. We’d gone through the two seasons of Breaking Bad, all of the sob-stories at least once, and anything with the word “love” in the title at least three.
I tried turning on my speakers and blasting music to chase away the silence, but somehow it still clung to the corners of the walls, never fully gone. I got a few texts from Liz asking about the apartment and when she could come see it, but the thought of people only staying for a little while and then leaving was so heavy, I couldn’t bring myself to invite her over to begin with. So, I told her I’d see her in class, made my bed, and let the silence envelope me for the next five days.
Sara is a first year Ph.D. student in Fiction at Oklahoma State University. They have an MFA in long-form fiction from American College Dublin in Dublin, Ireland, and an MA in English Literature from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Sara’s work tends to focus on behavioral psychology in all aspects of individuals’ lives.