Philadelphia Weekly

"C'mere. This is where we are," the bartender says, pointing at a northern point on the map spread open on the bar. The bartender is a small person in her 20s with laugh lines and long hair like polished wood.

"And here's where you should go next." She swirls her fingertip around on the space next to where we are. "That's a place where they'll take ya out and ... " She mimes elaborate hand clapping and foot tapping, bringing her knee up waist high.

Weak winter sun is warming the pub drowsily, like my mom's kitchen, like church. I dragged myself in here feeling the deep, resonant kind of sad you get when you're a stranger somewhere and you can't even remember what you're sad about because you're so totally alone. One pint wouldn't hurt.

Michaela has already told me about her French boyfriend, the fact that she's seen the Aurora Borealis four times, and how her friends from the south call her Subtitles cause they can't understand her accent. Now she's moving and ducking behind the bar, nonstop motion.

"You're more energetic than I am, I'll tell you that," I say. I've almost finished my one pint, and I'm already woozy.

"I'm a fookin' hellion is what I am," she corrects. "A hell-yun." She lights a cigarette. No smoking ban in this Ireland. "Another pint, Kee-yayteh?"

I peer down into my glass where it's quiet and have a little moment with myself. It might not be wise to get rip-roaring drunk in a strange city I've traveled to by myself without bothering to tell anyone where I went. Oh wait! I told Emily!

"Okay." Michaela smiles her approval. "Katie, girl, we're gonna get you out there tonight. John, I've adopted Katie," she says as a guy pushes the door open, letting in a burst of lemon yellow light.

"You're in for it now, Katie," John says, the corners of his mouth turned up slightly. He has a book with him, the same photo essay I looked at over mugs of tea in my B&B last night. Black-and-whites of Derry on Bloody Sunday and the nasty years that followed, of British soldiers crouching in doorways with machine guns, of teenagers in bellbottoms and gas masks.

"You guys are so much nicer than people in Dublin," I announce with sudden real feeling. It comes out like a shout.

"And we have much less reason to be," Michaela says, eyebrows raised in the direction of John's book. "Now try this. It's my latest recipe."

I get to work sipping a sloshy alcoholic milkshake through a straw. Bailey's? I don't ask, I just drink, then slide what's left down the bar to a smiling middle-aged woman and a couple of quiet men.

At some point a dark not-Irish guy slings his leg over the stool next to me. Michaela's boyfriend. They kiss quickly.

"Pint a stite?"

He looks confused. "Stite?"

"Stite," she says impatiently, pointing to the Guinness tap. Stout.

The two of them have a halting conversation with the performative air of people wanting to prove to themselves that they get each other, and I think about the difficulty I had, in the end, with my cross-cultural love affair, and about the miscommunications that happen between two people who think they're speaking the same language but find out they aren't, and haven't been all along.

My stite and I have some more thoughts like this, and three hours go by.