A Restless Mind in Solitude

Originally Published by Stray Words Magazine (2024)

Her brush dabs softly on the canvas, like the sea as it creeps up the beach, lapping at the shore. At a glance it doesn’t look like it’s making any progress, however, slowly but surely, the tide comes in and the canvas is covered.

Nora had woken to her news feed full of pictures of the northern lights. She’d missed it. She had turned her phone off in an attempt to get closer to nature, and in doing so missed one of the most beautiful natural occurrences of her lifetime. The sky had transformed over her as she slept on, oblivious. 

The pictures were spectacular, and Nora was furious at herself. So today she would finish her painting, then she would go to the cairns and see if the spectacle would return. 

The cairns were one of Nora’s favourite painting spots. Loughcrew was a megalithic site by Oldcastle, in County Meath. Said to be older than Newgrange. Way older than Stonehenge. If the lights were to return, that’s where she would find them. 

For a time, before she’d gotten sick, she lived in a squat up in Dublin by Herbert Park, with a girl obsessed with mythology and astrology. With witches, druids, the occult. The Celts, paganism. Ancient tombs especially, prehistoric landmarks, ley lines and the universal messages they gave out. They’d travelled Ireland exploring megalithic sites, in between gay marriage marches, psytrance raves, and Rainbow gatherings. 

That was before Nora lost her hair. Before her chest was a battlefield, absent of anything save for two long scars, like thick paint strokes. Before she’d left the city and moved out here, to the silence.

She continued to brush with soft, repetitive strokes as she tried to find the woman hidden in the white. She was painting her neighbour Therese from memory. So far she was struggling to bring her out. Nora usually painted landscapes or seascapes. Nature. Her attempts at portrait were so far not going well. Therese was in there somewhere. Submerged under the surface, the brush would find her in the ocean of white. In time Therese would show herself. You can’t force the tide.

She took a sip of water from the glass next to her. The jug was full of cleavers that she’d picked that morning, and it made the water feel full of life and energy and good things. She had settled completely into life in Cavan, alone with her paints. Acrylics. She liked acrylics. 

Nora was in the garden. It was unbearably sunny, she could hardly see the canvas through her squinting. It was typical of herself, to complain about the rain for three hundred and fifty days of the year and then complain as soon as it stopped and the sun came out. It was gorgeous really, having these late, light evenings. The grand stretch.

Her shoulders and arms were pink and burning. The skin on her face was peeling. She’d erected a fort out of an old umbrella to shield her from the sun, but it had done nothing to protect her, and she’d spent the afternoon getting cooked. If anything it seemed to have focused the sun’s rays on her, like a homing beacon. A magnifying glass pointed at an anthill.

She’d gone to Lidl the day before to get sun cream and toilet paper, and had returned with a hurl and sliotar, a wood embroidery machine, and two bottles of Bretagne cider. The hurl reminded her of her son, of when he was little and she’d drive him down to practice. He’d left home now, so there was no need for the hurl. She didn’t know why she bought it. She’d forgotten to buy sun cream or toilet paper. 

She would stop painting soon, leave it for tomorrow. The sun was fading and she’d need to make moves towards Loughcrew. She was happy with her progress. Therese was staring back at her; Nora had just started adding to the eyes, filling them with colour, pouring a lifeforce into her and bringing her out of the canvas, into reality. The waves of creativity continued their unrelenting embrace. The tide was coming in, however slowly.

Into the cottage to feed the dogs and make some tea. She scanned her news feed again. Kendrick and Drake were in the midst of a lovers quarrel, so if it wasn’t posts about aurora borealis it was posts about them. J. Cole featured in the love triangle somehow. Therese’s daughter had tried and failed to educate her on the subject. Nora felt there was so much to catch up on that it was hardly worth trying. She turned the radio to RTE Gold and the dulcet tones of Nina Simone swam through the kitchen. 

She didn’t see people often. She seldom spoke even, unless it was in that mumbling way she bickered to herself about her daily tasks. She had two dogs, one young and playful and mad and the other old and blind and grumpy. In the evenings she’d walk them down the lane and greet the neighbours' donkey, and then return. Between Therese and her daughter, the two dogs and the donkey, Nora felt her social circle was wide enough. 

She washed her brushes in the sink and wished she had a cigarette. She had quit smoking once she got sick, obviously. She missed not just the act of smoking, but the ritual; the Rizzla, the filters, hunting for a lighter, rolling the Amber Leaf, assembling the rollie like an IRA bomb-maker. Making tea was a bit similar in its ritualistic nature but it wasn’t the same.

Sun set, dogs fed and put to bed, she hopped in her little hatchback and waited as it purred itself to life. She drove the short winding lanes in the dark, Enya on the radio. No sign of anything yet. The sky had clouded over, and was a single shade of dark grey. She pressed on, fearing the lights would not return after all.

The walk up to the caves wasn’t long but Nora had to stop to rest more than once. The chemo had taken a lot out of her; she had been a surfing champion, a lifetime ago. The sky was still dark, although around the crescent moon the clouds looked stretched, like some ethereal force was pulling them into a whirlpool. A faint brightness was beginning to form. The colour gave Nora hope and she pressed on, hearing nothing but the sound of her own panting.

Eventually, she pulled herself to the top of the hill, and closed her eyes, and reached her arms out as far as she could, and breathed in as deeply as she could. Waited for her breathing to go back to normal. She was getting old. 

She was in near total darkness, the small slice of moon doing little to light the dark night sky. She thought of her painting, wondered if it would be any good when she finished. She wondered if she was wasting her time; Was she an artist, or was she just whiling away the hours before the cancer came back and took her? She thought of her old sick dog, and knew that his time was coming. She should have put him down already, really. It was probably cruel not to, but she couldn’t face it. She didn’t know what she’d do without him. She thought of her two children, both estranged and living on different sides of the planet. She wondered what they would think when she went.

She thought about all the years she’d been alive, how much had happened and how important it all had been and how insignificant it really was, how insignificant she really was. A drop in the ocean that was just as important as all the other drops and equally just as replaceable. She thought of everything and felt it all slip away into nothingness, replaced by the silence.  

As if in answer to her thoughts the sky erupted into a masterpiece of light and colour, travelling across the night sky like a tidal wave. The purple and blue and green surrounded her and washed over her. Engulfed by the rocks and stones put there by the ancestors of the land, the wind whipping a warmth through her like waves lapping the sand at high tide.