Ever since I turned
20 I am stateless, a drifter who is looking for a homeland.
Looking
back, I miss the aesthetics and standards of Stockholm, the options in London,
the soul of Cork, the laxity of Gothenburg, the human warmth of Rome.
Yet from
each of these places I escaped without ever having a doubt to reconsider
the decision.
And I know the
same will happen the day I leave Dublin.
I would have
liked to identify with a nation or at least with a city but in each of those where
I happened to live I ended up focusing on their defects which seemed to overwhelm
the qualities.
The lack of
soul of Stockholm, the dehumanization of London, the smallness of Cork, the
structural limits of Gothenburg, the impossibility of Rome, the repetitiveness of Dublin.
It would be
utopian to find a place with the Italian climate, the Swedish beauty, the
simplicity of Irish life and the variants of London; if a city like that ever existed
it wouldn’t last more than one day.
An old
principle says that if you stop trying to go for what you want you end up loving
what you can have.
I hope it
will never happen to me
