Patchwork Psychology

My heart bleeds as I try to rip it out of Ireland. I’ve been here three weeks now, but that’s nearly irrelevant–I was attached in the first few days.

Tomorrow I’m taking a solo adventure to Belfast. Perhaps I’ve romanticized Belfast to be something more than it is, but I’m stuck on it. I want to live there. I want to work there. I want it. But I can’t have it–and that perturbs me deeply. At least I’ll be able to be with it one last time, just her and I, and I’ll walk her City Centre and at 4:47PM I’ll take the last train to Ballymoney from Great Victoria Street Station. After that I’ll only see her again just long enough to get on the bus to Dublin and America. I ache just thinking about it.

Even before the first week was out, I started getting my resume out and around Ireland. From the best I can tell, most places aren’t interested in sponsoring me for a work permit. I’ve chatted with a recruitment agency or two, and haven’t gotten too far. If I were able to work in the UK, I would have no problem finding great paying work.

Sadly, the only way available to me to get a work permit is to get a job offer from a UK company and have them do the legwork to get a permit for me. Had I completed my bachelor degree, I’d be a shoo-in for the UK’s Highly-Skilled Migrant Programme, which would allow me to go to the UK and find work. That would be hot. But since I’m still 55 credits short of a BS, that won’t work out.

At any rate, I think I’ve put myself out on the UK job market quite well, and a little bit on the Republic of Ireland also. I guess I’m in a pretty good place when I can truly say that it’s completely in God’s hands right now. It really is better for me to get back to the States and let the infatuation for Ireland wear off so I can actually reason through it. If God wills it, an offer will come through. Maybe in the mean time I can finish my degree.

All that silly work stuff aside, Ireland is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. Take that with a grain of salt–I haven’t really seen much. However, there is some amount of credence to my words. Sometime in the first week I went to Portrush to check out a pub, and afterwards my party went down to the sea. It was probably midnight, and the ocean was frustrated. It wasn’t furious, just frustrated. I stood on the beach and peered into my soul, it seemed, as I stared out into the blackness where the frigid water melted into the overcast sky. I had no words in that moment, and I needed none. The sea spoke ever word I might have needed.

This week we returned to the Giant’s Causeway. The sea seems to have a profound effect on me. Its incessant pummeling of the shoreline rocks is deeply, deeply inspirational. I have to go back there. Friends, I miss it already. I have to go back. I have to.

PS: pictures are on Facebook