I’m absolutely fucked the last few days. It’s like walking without a compass in an endless desert. All I do is cry and wail on the stairs. Or write here. I can compartmentalise. One level where I can write about the events of the day. GAAGO or Rory Gallagher. My fingers work but my heart doesn’t.
This forum has become almost my only window into the outside world. I talk to my mother’s friend sometimes and each time she tells me I’ll be fine and I tell her her hip operation will go fine and each time it becomes steadily more apparent that she knows the square root of less than nothing about what is wrong with me, because she’s probably in the early stages of a neurodegenerative condition and can’t take in information. I talk to a lad on the phone in Dublin I haven’t seen since 2010, and he knows a lot more, and he talks to me for four hours on the phone every few weeks. All because he contacted me when I put up a post on Facebook that I was about to kill myself. I don’t want to kill myself just because he decided to talk to message me and talk to me and he listens to me and I don’t want to let him down. I don’t want to let other people down who have talked to me.
But nothing works. Talking doesn’t work and walking doesn’t work and trying to get answers doesn’t work and longer evenings definitely don’t work, they’ve only made it worse. The longer evenings have given me an emptiness I feel which impossible to put adequately into words. It rains all the time and I’m glad it rains because I feel worse if the sun shines. Nobody seems to be able to help. It’s totally crushing and I’m totally crushed and want out.
Detached retinas destroy lives. Genuinely. They cut you down ruthlessly and remorselessly and make you beg for the end.
All my dreams now are about watching GAA with my oul’ fella. Last night I dreamt that I was in Croke Park, on Hill 16, but only briefly, that I left the stadium before the first match had even begun. It was a wet day, and Dublin are playing the second match of a double header against Cavan. The first game was Mayo v Galway and I didn’t see that. I think this is related to the reality that I spent the entirety of the Mayo v Galway League final writing a letter to an eye surgeon in Dublin to beg him if he’d see me, and then breaking down sobbing after I’d finished writing it. In the dream myself and my oul’ fella are on a Dublin Bus, and we’re listening to the commentary of Dublin v Cavan. Dublin go from 0-12 to 0-4 up to 0-12 to 0-16 down. Then we get home and try to catch the last few minutes of the match on the telly, but the telly doesn’t work. Dublin lose to Cavan, this is the first Dublin championship defeat I have not attended since 1990.
I dream about Cusack Park in Ennis, and watching Tony Kelly play hurling. I keep wailing things about Tony Kelly and seeing Clare play. I’ve only been in Cusack Park in Ennis once in my life, when Clare beat Dublin in 2012. I think I keep dreaming about it and talking about it because the one time I was there was the definition of a carefree life, of summer, of the simple joy of being alive, of losing, of there being pleasure in losing, because Dublin were chased out of the place and we were chased out of the shed (we weren’t) and the current era of Clare hurling was born that night and because Tony Kelly was awesome and Patrick O’Connor was awesome and you couldn’t help thinking that this whole thing was fucking great to just be a small part of.
I dream about Tony Kelly and Clare hurling because I went out for a walk to listen to the second half of the Limerick-Clare game while walking past the GAA pitches at Dangan, and the last two minutes of it I was walking through a massive car park, and it was starting to rain, and I was listening to Syl and Tommy, and the ground surface of the car park was sloping downward away from me, because my eyesight is fucked, and because I was seeing two of each car, one the real car, the other a slanted dinky below it and to the right, and I was crying to myself, because I was in another world. I hate the lamposts that lead the way down the lane to river at Dangan. They torture me.
When I was in a car last night after I walked out of the house to go to a multi-story car park in the centre of Galway City to throw myself off, and my mother caught up with me in the car as I was screaming on Newcastle Road and told me to get in, and I got in and we drove past the prom in Salthill, I was wailing about Tony Kelly. And my Mam asked me were Clare playing again soon and I wailed that they are but that I could not go to see it.
On the 5th of April I went to a funeral, the father of a lad I know here in Galway. I imagined myself in the coffin and I wanted to be in the coffin.
On the 6th of April at about 4:40pm I left my house. I walked to the same place I went onto the rail line before Christmas. On the way I stopped to buy a bottle of vodka at the off licence opposite the entrance to Merlin Park hospital. It was a lovely sunny evening. My plan was to go onto the tracks, drink the vodka and walk under a train. When I got to the crossing where I walked onto the railway before Christmas, instead of going onto the tracks I kept walking and walked as far as Oranmore, on the hard shoulder of the coast road. I looked across the water at the houses on the far side of Oranmore, and saw pathetic double vision, squiggles of houses lying in the water in front. I walked around Oranmore village for an hour, I walked to the junction with the old Limerick road and back, and sat around the benches in the village. There were young people playing football on the astro pitches in front of Calasanctius College. I envied them and I imagined Tony Keady being over there with them having a laugh. I thought about going into a pub for a pint but didn’t. I smoked one cigarette on a bench. I thought about walking out to the rail line near the water tower on the old Dublin road where a young chap threw himself under a train in April 2020. Instead I went into a petrol station shop in the village and walked around the shop for four minutes looking for something to get coin change for the bus from a fiver. I bought a packet of Tuc biscuits. Then I got the bus home, it goes from Oranmore all the way to the bottom of my road, and held my head in my hands the whole way back. I still haven’t opened the bottle of vodka.
On the Friday, the 7th of April, which was Good Friday, I rang that Pieta House helpline for the first time since the 23rd of December, and I sobbed into the phone. There was a woman from Donegal on the other end of the line and she reminded me of my granny and I told her tank you for talking to me. That was from about 5:30pm to 6:30pm. Then on the Sunday night I went to the Community Cafe thing opposite the hospital and talked to a woman younger than myself for an hour and a half, the same woman I talked to about six weeks previously, and I walked home in the rain and half watched the end of the golf. Rory McIlroy was in my dream last night too. I dreamt I was a caddy for a player playing with him, at Augusta, and he was winning, but he somehow lost. In the dream, Augusta was Athenry Golf Club.
On the 20th of April, which was a Thursday, I left my house at about 5pm and walked to Woodies in Wellpark and bought a rope, which cost 33 euro. As I passed the roundabout beside Bohermore Cemetery the rush hour traffic was backed up. There was a large coach bus stationary on the roundabout. I thought about lying with my head under the wheel but didn’t. I came back up from Woodies and went in to see my father’s grave. His 80th birthday was on the 28th of March. This was the first time I’d been to his grave for probably over a year, maybe since Christmas 2021. Then I walked home barely able to put one foot in front of the other. I got home about half seven.
On the Friday the 22nd of April I made a noose. I’ve watched numerous videos about how too make a hangman’s noose or a thing called a slipknot. I still haven’t worked out how to do it properly. There’s a wooden beam going across the garage, about seven feet in the air. I tied the noose and went back inside.
My uncle came to the house for a few days to do insulation in the attic, this is the third time he’s been here since my eye went. He must have gone out to the garage and found the noose because when I went out to the garage on the Saturday, the noose was gone and I never saw the rope again. The Saturday evening was damp. I went out for a walk down past the pitches at Dangan and then down past the river as far as the college, listening to the end of the Galway-Wexford game and the start of the Armagh v Cavan game. I could barely put one foot in front of the other. Every time I go out for a walk now, I slow down as I walk, and by the end of the walk I’m moving at crawl speed, it might take me two minutes to walk 100 metres. There was a guy in the psychiatric ward who walked at this crawl speed with an otherworldly stare on him. This is how I walk now, always.
On the 24th of April, my uncle and my mother arranged an appointment for me the following day at a place in Athlone, with an actual opthalmologist. But the opthalmologist in Athlone the following day merely informed me that because my macula had come off, there would always be damage to my eye. I have appointments in Dublin on the 17th of May, on the first of June, on the 14th of June, and I don’t know how I will bring myself to get to any of them.
I have researched every suicide that took place on Irish Rail tracks since 2015. I research about why a 14 year old camogie player might throw herself under a train between Bray and Greystones at 6:30am on a November morning, or why an 18 year old might thrown himself in front of a train at Harmonstown on a beautiful summer evening. I have watched every suicide video on gore websites. I have watched videos where people were knocked down and crushed by lorries, and their hearts were squeezed out of their bodies by the impact and lay still beating on the side of the road.
In a parallel universe where my eye was OK, I would be going to Ennis on the train to see Tony Kelly play hurling, or to Thurles to see Tipperary play Limerick, to Dublin to meet people. Last year I was paralysed, paralysed by trauma from my father’s death and from the pandemic. By the end of the summer I was largely out of this. I had all sorts of ideas for what I was going to do with my life, for what I was going to do in 2023. All of it gone forever, that is what it feels like.
I expected this to be bad, very bad. It has been way worse than even I expected, and I’m the world’s biggest pessimist. This I guess took me about an hour to write, more than an hour, maybe an hour and a half. I don’t know what to do with the rest of my day now. This is the part of the day, 3-6pm, that drags the most. I’m afraid to go out. All the places where I can walk, at a crawl, are stale to me, they all carry ghosts now. I have voices in my head, the voices are the distortion in my vision, and the double vision. I look at YouTube videos of epiretinal membrane surgery, and I can feel my eye crying out for this surgery. I want to stick a needle in myself and do it myself. I know I won’t be offered this surgery. I know it probably wouldn’t even make that much difference. I just imagine some surgeon peeling the distortion off my retina and making me see properly again. As I went to the toilet the other night before bed, I imagined me having a cataract being taken out and an intra-ocular lens put in, and me removing the shield after surgery and being able to see properly, and me running up the street in tears and hugging people. Then back to reality, and bed.
I only want somebody who knows to tell me I’ll recover from this affliction. I need another chance at life, just fucking one more chance, please. I can’t live with life like this, I can’t get through. I’m begging, on my knees, somebody, anybody.
