Our sex-life was as evasive as a four-leaf clover. I started to dread weekends— what on earth would we talk about? I spent my birthday in Mexico without him. He started seeing a woman, “just a friend,” and doing things with her I’d begged him for years to do with me. The ballet, museums, skiing. I fumed. Retaliated. Polarization deepened. The night before he moved out, we sat at the kitchen table and I poured us two shot glasses of tequila. We drank and talked. “It’s time,” he said, “I’ve known for eight years we shouldn’t be married.” I swallowed and felt the burn. With the signing of the Belfast Agreement (often called the Good Friday Agreement) The Troubles came to an end, politically speaking. But a few months later, a bomb went off in Omagh that killed 29 civilians, and it was the single worst incident during the Troubles. “After that, people decided they just had had enough,” Maureen, a Belfast native, tells me one night at Crom Castle. One of her best friends lost her legs in that explosion. It was a combination of the talks, the politics, and the cease fires, she told me, but ultimately, that inner shift had to take hold deep inside of people, so that they could move on and find a new way to get along. In Northern Ireland, the last decade has been relatively quiet. Mostly, people are on good behavior.
But I have not always chosen to be on my good behavior. On the shortest night of the year in Fermanagh, I squatted in front of an enormous bonfire and sipped a stranger’s moonshine. Villagers clad in straw leaped across open flames, saying prayers of sacrifice and thanks. “It’s our way to give back,” the caller said into the blurry-sounding bullhorn. “To remember where we’ve come from.”