I was born into a country of storytellers.
Ireland gave me this: the certain knowledge that the space between a breath and a heartbeat is not empty. It is crowded with whispers. With the almost-remembered. With the ones who walked into a rath (faerie ring) and never came back, or came back wrong, or came back with a fairy’s gift and a faerie’s curse.
To be Irish is to live in two worlds at once. The world of the clock, the kettle, the cottage range. And the other world—the one behind the green door, the one at the bottom of the lake, the one that opens when you say a name you swore you would forget.
This is not superstition. It is imagination. And imagination, in Ireland, is a kind of memory.
We remember the ones who were taken. The ones who followed the music. The ones who stayed too long at the faerie hill and woke up a hundred years later, alone. We remember them not because we believe in faeries the way we believe in gravity but because forgetting would be a smaller country to live in. And we have always chosen the larger country.
I wrote this book for the ones who wait. For the sisters who keep looking. For the mothers who burn shoes and regret it. For the boys with no names and the fairies who are a bit of idiots. For the electricians who hold onto buttons and the librarians who catalogue love. For everyone who has ever lost something and refused to stop saying its name.
Being Irish is a privilege. Not because of the green fields or the soft rain or the way we sing sad songs at weddings. Because we were given a heritage of imagination—a permission slip to believe that what is lost is not gone, only moved. That the dead are not silent, only speaking in a language we have forgotten how to hear. That the space between a breath and a heartbeat is wide enough to hold every goodbye that ever ended too soon.
This book is my small attempt to map that space.
The Áit Eile is real. It is wherever you put the things you cannot let go. But remember: keeping is not the same as loving. Letting go is not the same as forgetting.
And somewhere, in a complaints box that no longer exists, a lost button glows blue.
Go raibh maith agat.
—Brendan Dunne
Cill Mór, County Clare
The year the fair returned
