Sex and the City (2)

How unbelievable amazing is it to wake up beside someone. Stark bollock naked. Ok, I’m getting a little graphic here but there’s nowhere else I can say these things so feck off! I mean, it’s something about trust and comfort and intimacy that causes such a situation to happen, ideally. And this was ideal. Outside it’s raining but inside it’s…..warm. Just hugging and talking and touching and………I just………I can’t describe how happy I feel these days. Ever since I left college, I’m just on a permanent “ok, I’ll do that!!” kind-of buzz. And sitting beside her in bed, looking at her big eyes and just sometimes we’d stop talking and kiss and it’s so…..right. I mean, it felt so strange to be with her the night before. When I first met her at the bus station, we hardly said to words. The realisation that despite all the groundwork from the texting, the phone conversations and all that, I didn’t really know her as in sitting beside her. And sometimes during the evening I got this tremendous urge to say “I don’t fancy you” because I barely knew her like this and I liked her as the funny, heartfelt, sexy girl I texted. Not this quiet, bumbling, awkward girl walking beside me. But if you give it some time, you realise that that person who’s words you loved really is the person beside you. More and more, as barriers fall and hearts open up, you realise that no-one is who they say they are in words straight away. But they are that person. It’s just that sometimes, the heart can write better than it can speak. And I’m like that. So she was probably thinking “who the hell is this idiot beside me??” I say that too, but it’s usually when I’m standing next to a mirror. Badda-boom!

Right, so we eventually got up and went for a wander around the town. It was Sunday, and despite a breakfast from Moyrah’s fella we were still a little peckish. Cormac had joined us, and recommended a place called “The Home Plate”. Two words: organic fry. The traditional, heart-attack-on-a-plate we all know and love, only the sausages, beans, eggs, rashers, spuds and mushrooms all lived their lives drug-free, like Cliff Richard. And like life, it looked weird and just wasn’t right. The sausages were dry, the beans were big chewy yokes with chilli sauce, the eggs….well, ok the eggs were fine. The rashers were tasteless, and spuds were dry and rough and even the mushrooms were tiny and dirty-looking. In short, chemicals, be they weedkillers, colouring, additives or preservatives are good for you because without them you’d hate your dinner every day. I left the fry. I never leave fries, but this one was hideous.

After a while, we ended up in Skeef’s, a great big pub on Eyre Square. It was Sunday afternoon, but the atmosphere was so…..Friday night. Galway’s cool like that. And there was the other couply moment. Sat in a pub with Deb, on a couch with my arm around her, chatting away and taking the odd sup of a pint. Anyone would just walk past and say to themselves subconsciously “couple”. That’s very strange to me. It’s the most normal thing I’ve done with a girl since I was 17 and had a short-lived fiasco with a now-unmarried-mother-slag-of-a-yoke-altogether I used to jokingly refer to as “my first”. That girl has been erased from my history, but it can’t be denied that she was the first and, until then, only girl I had done boy-girl things with as opposed to desperate snogging/groping in a nightclub after eight pints. I may have grown up.

I don’t care if this thing with Deb is serious or not. Well, not just yet. She is great and everything, but I got the feeling sometimes that she’s going to ring me or text me and say she can’t do this anymore. Don’t get me wrong; I’d love nothing more than to have the kind of weekend I had in Galway again. But I’m not gonna hold my breath. I’m ready for a fall; something like this makes me suspicious, mainly because on paper everything is going so well and we’re getting on so well. But while Deb was in the toilet on Sunday night in the pub, I got talking to her friend Sarah and I had to ask “what does she think of me, really?” Sarah said Deb likes me, but she’s asked Sarah “d’ya think he likes me?” And I do, and I’ve told her how much I liked spending time with her. And I never stopped holding her the whole time. And if I saw me, I’d say I liked her. And so would you. I actually think I might be coming on too strong. I wish I knew what she was thinking. Oh God, I’m turning into a girl.

I looked back at Galway as the sun set over it on Monday evening just after 6pm. The bus was taking the coast road to Oranmore and eventually arrived in Dublin three and a half hours later. I wish I could have stayed. I imagined my life there, how I could live in a city of 60,000 people on the other edge of Ireland, past all the flat, soft hills that show glimpses of the lights between them now and then. No flashing lights like Dublin, nothing towering above anything. Just a huge stretched out rug of a city, picnicking on the edge of the Atlantic Sea.

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