As I sit here on a cross-country train bound for Dublin for the return leg of our honeymoon, I’m uncharacteristically at a loss for words. Sure I could ramble onwards, as I sadly do sometimes, but I fear nothing I might say could truly express what the trip has meant to me.

Surreal. Yes, that’s the best word that I can use to describe the entire process. Surreal…not real. Or at least not sinking in. As if magically transported to another world, we’ve spent the past nine days exploring a world that only my mind’s eye could unfairly try and dream up. I’ve chatted with old men at country gas stations, driven through fairytale landscapes, walked the hills of ancient islands and sipped coffee in famous and forgotten towns alike. I’ve retraced my family lineage back to the early 1800s and spoken with cemetery caretakers that knew my kinfolk. I’ve prayed in churches and walked roads that my grandfathers knew by heart long ago. And yet sitting here, watching the Irish landscape pass by in shades of misty green and muted orange, I still falter for the right words to pin it all down.

Perhaps that’s just it, though. Perhaps I’m not supposed to be able to capture it in words. I relinquished myself early on, freeing myself from attempting to capture the photographs of a lifetime, as I knew that I would be distressed about it. Yet here I am trying to package and bind the past week and a half into an appropriately intense few paragraphs. So for the sake of preservation, for brevity and most importantly for sanctity, I shall for once hold my tongue.

I’m sure that the stories and the memories that have been written on my heart will eventually find there way into writing. All in their own time, I suppose.

Originally written on October 26, 2005.