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Water has been the undoing of me. It has been the undoing of my family. We swim in it in the womb. We are composed of it. We drink it. We are drawn to it throughout our lives, more than mountains, deserts, or canyons. But it is terrible. Water kills.
There’s something about long walks, little social interaction, and no Wi-Fi that does wonders for the soul.”
The elements—water, earth, fire, air—are our greatest friends, our animators. They feed us, warm us, give us life, and yet conspire to kill us at every juncture. But I don’t need their permission to take me away. If I could simply clap my hands and fall into a deep sleep out here, never to wake again, I would clap them. I would clap them again and again and again until I was gone from this world and reborn or forgotten, whatever the universe decided.
The only thing that reappeared time and again in my work were images of soil, not the smooth, tilled land of the farm I was working on, but the rough, unplowed hills that led from the island port to my parents’ house. I was reared in the mud and the dirt, and it showed up repeatedly on my canvases, even when I didn’t want it to. But the earth is a part of me. The feel of it on my skin. The taste of it in my mouth.
The scent of the soil is almost overwhelming now. It’s trapped in my nostrils, making it hard for me to breathe. The stench of the football pitch. The smell of the farm I grew up on. The stink of the forest where Cormac Sweeney humiliated me and broke something inside me.
waiting for the police to show up, which they will sooner or later, I realize the stench of earth has finally cleared from my nostrils. I can breathe freely at last.
When I think of that night, there are three things I recall above all else. My frantic longing for water. The sound of the earth as they flung spadefuls down upon my improvised coffin. And my desperate need for air as I sucked what I could through the small breathing tube they had left me with. Only one of the four elements—fire—was missing that night, but its time would come.
The elements destroy everything. Think of water. When someone drowns, and their body floats back to shore, their features are so bloated it can be difficult to identify them. Think of earth. When a body is buried, it starts to decompose immediately. Think of air. If we’re deprived of it for even a few minutes, we die. Then think of fire. When someone’s physical appearance is damaged by burns, we turn away, repulsed. We don’t want to know.”
from the moment we arrive on the planet the universe is against us, conspiring to drown us, set us on fire, bury us in the earth, our spirits floating off into the atmosphere.
while I keep a very ordered home screen, collecting all my apps in neatly organized folders, his is utter chaos, a Jackson Pollock painting splashed across dozens of pages in no conceivable order.
Since my twelfth summer, I have been consumed by fire, laying waste to everything and everyone around me. Today, when I wake, things feel different. Enough has happened. Too many risks have been taken. It’s time to quench the flames forever and find some form of peace.
I’ve never been much of a Guinness drinker, but it turns out that it’s true what they say: it’s better in Ireland.
I plunge back down now, blocking out all the noise of the world around me, but keep my eyes open, staring into the dark black depths of the water, feeling the tug of the earth, the fire within me, and the air that remains in my lungs. I’m not there yet, but one day I will be. At one with myself, at one with the universe, and—finally—at one with the elements.
