Erasmus Diary - When My Heart Yearns For Home
By Alison Weldon
Collage by Roisín McGrath
I remember it so vividly, as if I wrote and directed the scene. I was on the edge of seventeen (as the Stevie Nicks song goes), sitting in the back garden of my home house, the spring sun making it so I didn’t have to wear a jumper, drinking tea with my mam; Lyons, always. Together we romanticised the idea of me travelling Europe. In this dream I went to the University of Galway and studied Spanish, maybe Italian. In my third year of college I would be off somewhere beautiful and new, on Erasmus.
After years of this thought being my motivation, I’m now there.
I arrived in Salamanca, Spain, after teary farewells with everyone I had never had to say goodbye to before, not yet knowing how far the extent of my missing them would go. Having one of my best friends by my side, a little piece of home, who I have never taken for granted made it a whole lot easier. Life stretched out before me, sparing no corners, and, as if it were a physical thing, I grabbed onto it.
A few weeks in the Rugby World Cup began and what a good excuse for togetherness that was. I remember the first day, christening the local Irish pub as our game viewing spot for the foreseeable and our presence soon permeating it every Saturday night. It was the only one with an actual Irish name, unlike The Holy Cross or, laughably, The Bloody Pearl. It seemed authentic, and we yearned for that Irishness, as much as we might have pretended not to need it.
A friend I had gone with pointed out the Irish accents belonging to a group of strangers in the bathroom, and figured it was a good enough reason to bravely introduce herself. Ironically, that was exactly how I met her. The first game was in the afternoon, and that night we all went out together. Funnily enough, we went back to that same place.
Friendships started to blossom, expanding and leaning into me as if I were the sun. It was a euphoric feeling, knowing I had to crawl out of my shell, even if it was with trepidation, and the fact that I actually did. In Galway, I knew someone because they knew someone. Here, I planted the seeds and watched them grow from the ground up. I know, even long after the passage of time has weathered my body, I will think of this as one of my biggest achievements. Stars aligned in the right place at the right time, or maybe it was written in the prophecy all along. We had all come to Spain to meet people who were only from the next county over. I cursed the universe for not allowing me to meet them sooner, and thanked it for bringing them here.
When November came, so did the homesickness. The abysmal need to watch my best friend at home perform at open mic night, make my grand return to Róisín Dubh, and feel the unconditional love passed through the embrace of my family clawed at my chest and got through to my heart and clawed at that too. At least, the parts of it that I hadn’t left behind. My world and the idea of it came crashing down all around me and I spent every day for two weeks lying underneath the rubble, which was really just the single bed in my small Spanish apartment. I didn’t know how to get out of it. I thought it was the end and that I would no longer find contentment here, and the aches in my soul wouldn’t be soothed until my feet stood on the Emerald Isle once more.
What got me through it was my family; phone calls from the one I had at home and being with the one I had made here. I had never understood the importance of Irish community until I was surrounded by it in a foreign country. I miss every crevice of Galway and I want to be the size of a god so I can put my hands all over it and tell it “you’re mine.” For now, I have refuge in Paniagua, the local ‘club’ the size of my kitchen, which plays Katy Perry and Taylor Swift on repeat. Home, and the people who make it so are always with me, whether it is in memory or presence. And one night when I embarrassingly fell down the liquor coated stairs, I bled green.
