In the quiet room of the Armagh City Youth Hostel, the instructors have convened for a very important meeting: there is a bottle of cherry wine that must be consumed. There’s one problem: there’s no corkscrew in the hostel and it’s after 6PM in Armagh! After much consideration, they’re heading off to McAnerney’s, the Catholic grocery store “just down the hill”, to retrieve one.
It’s the second to last day of our time in Northern Ireland, but nobody is treating it like some sort of series finale. We’re simply here with each other, just like any other night we’ve been together. Do you remember the series finale of Everybody Loves Raymond, how nobody died, there wasn’t a wedding, nobody moved to some new and foreign place, how it was just like any other episode in the series? That’s what this feels like right now.
Not to be sappy and sentimental, but I suppose that’s the way it ought to be, considering that these last days in Armagh don’t serve as any sort of finale for anything, aside from the completion of a curriculum. We’re not saying goodbye to writing, inquiry, creativity, sarcasm, and the English language. We’re not saying goodbye to the world outside of America. And we’re certainly not saying goodbye to each other. We may not have this specific set of experiences again, but we will always have these memories, these lessons, and (I’m speaking for everyone here) one of the most special families we’ll ever have. You can bet your bottom goddamned dollar that Sunday won’t be the last time we see each other, and I don’t mean on Facebook.
So we’ll take this piece of our life back with us to our usual mundanity (jobs, school, cleaning) and carry it with us everywhere we go. It’ll be with us when we’re eating an overstuffed Chipotle burrito. It’ll be with us when we’re awake at 3AM, trying to finish another goddamn term paper. It’ll be with us when we set out on our own, change the world, get old, and die. Armagh and the family we created here will always be with us.
This is my last blog post. I’m sorry it was so schmaltzy, but not really. I’m not sorry about anything about this trip.
Thank you for your time. I look forward to speaking to you again one day during ieiMedia’s Armagh Project All-Stars. I’m dead serious. I’ve never been more serious.
We will always have Armagh. And we get to re-stage part of Reflections in mid October and early November.
Damn right we do!
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