It’s that time of the night again where everything is bleary, my fingers are numb from typing two other blog posts, and a sentimental air fills the quiet room of the Armagh City Youth Hostel. I look out the window, and it’s pure dark and I wonder, with the end of my journey rapidly approaching, what will I miss most? Aside from the people who I, of course, have already served a big bowl of mushy emotions to in weeks previous.

See, over the course of our time here, teams of various sizes have gone on expeditions in the alien world of late night Armagh, exploring the terrifyingly still world of 3AM Northern Ireland. For some context, everything that isn’t a bar or Domino’s closes at 6PM around here, even on the weekends, so, by the witching hour, everything is dead quiet. Is it a cultural hangnail from the Troubles, the aftershock from decades of curfews and paramilitary boogeymen? Are people just tired from the endless daylight that peaks out around 430 in the morning and isn’t fully gone until 11 at night? Regardless, the world is absolutely still on a clear night in Armagh. Aside from the occasional wind and the passing of a tractor trailer on the highway, you’ll scarcely find a soul to speak of.

It’s a marked contrast to even a smaller city like Baltimore, where sirens and shouting can be heard throughout the night. I don’t not like it in Baltimore; it feels alive, at least. There’s so much life and light and activity in Baltimore, but, at the same time, so much grit and vigor. I can walk very specific strips of Baltimore at all hours of the night, soaking in the dozens of other people hiking the same streets.

I love Baltimore, and I love the life there, but if there is one thing I will miss of Armagh the most, it will be this contrasting stillness outside of the window right now. It will be the friary ruins, starkly lit in cerulean hues, deathly quiet on the inside, blocking out even the chirping of the insects. It will be the common lots between apartments and trailers under the moonlight and prosthetic haze of televisions buzzing through windows. It will be my skin turned goldenrod as I sit upon the bench in the abandoned main strip of city centre. It will be the pitch black silhouette of the statues and fixtures on the Armagh mall. I will miss these moments that present opportunities for introspection and quiet constitutionals with friends.

My friends from this trip, we’ll be in touch forever (duh, obviously). But it’s that unique feeling of total isolation that will make me sick to return to this remote county of Ulster well into my years.