I escape to Kerry, and fish and walk and read, but Thursday rolls around and my birthday happens anyway. My first quarter century. It is natural for our generation, my brother points out, to be nonplussed by the 18th and 21st but feel more struck on decimal milestones; the decades and half-decades. These are the ones that have felt a big deal.
We eat dinner in Dingle, my parents and brother and his girlfriend. The food is ridiculous: warm squid salad, rare tuna steak, chocolate cake dessert. We eat and eat, and I finish with two pints of stout, my stomach swollen, distended, glorious. Two hours after hitting hay I wake up standing at my room’s far wall, cursing and scrabbling at a door that doesn’t exist, or rather does, only 200 miles away. My bladder aching. I wake the next morning, still full, and see I have unbolted the attic door in my sleep. Summoned by some Púca seeking escape? By the room is empty and I feel normal. Unpossessed.
Perhaps it was an exit sought, given the significance of the day, the hour. I open the hatch and peer into the black corridor, but cannot see my lost youth anywhere. Later on I find it in the bathroom mirror, indecently unperturbed. It’s hard to feel the weight of aging when one’s face is running four years slow.