Jennifer Carroll is a 21 year old actor and writer. She first began writing for the Uxbridge Cosmos in 2007 when she had the opportunity to share her experiences as a Canadian ambassador for an international conference for women in Dubai. At the beginning of 2008, she moved to Ireland to pursue a career in theatre and film. Far From Home is her monthly account on living and working in Dublin.
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The capture of time
So, I have this odd tendency - a quirky habit, I suppose I could call it if I felt particularly endearing. Whenever I leave a place I expect it to suspend itself in time, to pause, until I return. I take a still photograph upon my departure, so to speak, and preserve that capture of a moment in time until I return and insert myself back into the image before time resumes. This way, I miss nothing of the places I love.
I'm always surprised by my expectation, subconsciously, that this is a feasible option wherever I go (or, I suppose, wherever I leave behind). When I'm in Dublin, dodging raindrops as I walk along cobblestoned streets, I imagine Uxbridge standing in stillness, holding its breath until my plane touches down at Pearson again. Then it resumes, breathing back into motion, ready for me to slip back in step right where I left off. And likewise, whenever my emerald home slips into clouds behind my plane and I bound across the Atlantic back to my beloved hometown, I expect the city behind me to stop in its tracks and stay there until I touch safely back down on mossy asphalt.
Silly, I know. Unreasonable, yes. Seasons change, babies grow, doors revolve and time passes, as it always does and ever will. Even in the places where I am not, amazingly.
I had the most amazing summer on stage within the community that raised me, and time moved languorously, like sticky molasses. The summer sun slowed the seconds and minutes in each day as it reached its daily heights, and I blissfully let it envelop me. But then September rushed in, and began its unrelenting march toward my fly-back date. I was sorry and excited at the same time. I wanted to stay suspended in the summer haze while simultaneously rushing forward, back to my familiar niche between the clouds and emerald carpets of grass. Alas, I can have only one at a time. So the day came to pack my life back up into my battered suitcase, strap my mandolin to my back and march on ahead.
Air currents and jet engines whisked me east, and as I stepped back into my city, I gently chided myself when mild surprise greeted me. Months had passed here… without me. The mild air was cooler - an almost imperceptible change, but a change nonetheless. The sun looked older, as it tends to do when the year is closing in on its final quarter. The street around the corner from my flat had been repaved. There was someone new working at the café on my corner. There was a new flavour of muffin at the bakery that smells so good every time I pass it at the exact right moment in the morning.
My mind gasped with the betrayal - Dublin had moved on in time without me. It had altered, in the slightest of ways. Though as I began to notice them, it's the slight, unremarkable alterations that are the most profound. And I realized I had some catching up to do with my auld friend Dublin. We had grown apart this summer while I cozied up to Uxbridge. We hadn't kept in touch the way we should have. And in that brief season, my familiar friend had changed.
And I wondered, there in that moment of crystallized thought - had Dublin noticed changes in me? Had I shifted, faintly? Could the city see that time had passed in me, too? That my months spent with Maud and the countryside stilled my manic mind and soothed my thirsty soul? That the summer sun expanded my imagination and lengthened my patience? That I had seen things, done things, tasted things, in Dublin's absence?
Because while Dublin feels different, I feel different, too. When I leave a place, it does not just go on without me, but I go on without it as well. So like old friends that have been reunited after too much time away from each other, we are getting to know each other again - our intimacies, our secrets, our private joys and expectations. And my auld mate is becoming familiar, once more.
