I find myself continually filling the margins of my notebooks with words and phrases spoken by people around me. I’m a notorious eavesdropper, and whenever I find myself at a loss for inspiration, I flip back to these isolated thoughts in order to search for the train of thought that’s abandoned me. Thumbing through the pages of my travel journal so far, I find gems like these:

• “I don’t know about you, but I find the 188 bus incredibly spacious.”
• “That parrot is a majestic beast.”
• “I’m neither awake nor asleep. I’m thinking.”
• “Anarchy is a game that the police play very well.”
• “Living among strangers: the lost meaning of home.”

Beyond being the tagline for this year’s John Hewitt International Writers’ Festival, this phrase seems relevant to us here in Armagh, settling into a hostel with fifteen other people we barely knew existed before Friday morning. Besides a few emails from the program directors instructing us to send our flight details, all I had by way of an introduction to the other members of the Armagh Project was the brief paragraph blurbs that we provided for the blog. And those were far from reliable, considering that we wrote them ourselves.

Life lesson: we are at the same time our own best and worst mirrors.

Every time I sit down to write a biography about myself, I end up staring at the blinking cursor for far longer than might be rationally expected. It doesn’t seem like it should be this difficult: who knows who I am better than I do, after all? I have to spend every single day with myself, so shouldn’t I be able to verbalize that daily reality in fifty words or less?

Maybe it’s not so easy as that.

Think about it: what thinks make you you? Is it what you’re studying in school? Is it a job or internship that you’re working from nine to five? Is it what you do on a Sunday evening after you’ve emptied out your Netflix queue? Is it the way you use “queue” as both a noun and a verb after a few weeks of living in the British Isles without realizing you’re doing it? Or is it something else entirely, something far more difficult to verbalize?

If I were to express who I was in a paragraph, I would need the paragraph to take twenty-one years and two months (exactly, actually) to read. Every single day I’m alive, I’m in the process of becoming a different person. If, as I like to believe, we are defined by our thoughts, beliefs, and worldviews, I’m certainly a different person right now than I was three hours ago, before I had dinner with ex-IRA member and current conflict mediation leader Tommy McKearney. My head’s exploded with thoughts I don’t know how to process about four times since lunchtime. I don’t know how to think anymore, let alone the effect that’s had on me.

If the most important part of my identity, the reality I live with on the inside every day, can change that easily, what business do I have claiming that I can reduce this constantly shifting ephemera to a quick sound byte, to share on an “About Us” page?

Living with strangers, then, is inevitable. If it’s impossible to fully express who I am, how can I expect anyone else to really know me? How can I expect to know who anyone else is when language and tangible space forbids us making any connections of genuine depth? Are we destined to drift through life like atoms, bound together by circumstances and electrical currents of events swirling around us, close but never touching? Are stretched and elaborate metaphors like this the only hope we have of bridging the gap between us?

In a way, everyone in the world is a stranger. Some are just more strange than others.

But if everyone is a stranger, and no one can really understand us the way we internally, non-verbally understand ourselves, then no one is really more alone than anyone else. And if we’re all alone together, then the optimist in me is inclined to believe that everywhere, just as well as anywhere, can be home.

With that in mind, I’m perfectly willing to call Armagh my home until the end of July. A community of close-knit strangers, being strange strangers alone and together, alone and side by side.

A hostel of contradictions. Yet the world turns.